Hantavirus outbreak has new updates, PCOS is now PMOS, fish hides in another animal’s ‘butthole’

May 18, 2026

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Hantavirus outbreak has new updates, PCOS is now PMOS, fish hides in another animal’s ‘butthole’

What you should know about hantavirus, why PCOS is getting a new name, and how some fish hide in an unusual spot

By Rachel Feltman, Tanya Lewis, Andrea Gawrylewski, Sushmita Pathak & Alex Sugiura

NurPhoto / Contributor/GettyImages

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Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup.

First, let’s check in on the hantavirus situation. Tanya Lewis, SciAm’s senior desk editor for health and medicine, is here with an update.

Feltman: Tanya, thanks so much for coming on to chat with us.

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Tanya Lewis: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Feltman: So how have things changed with regard to hantavirus since we last spoke?

Lewis: More people have been confirmed to have the virus or are suspected to have it. We’re now up to 11 suspected cases and three deaths, two of which were confirmed cases, I believe.

While there are more cases the virus has not spread, you know, wildly, and these are all cases that were passengers on the ship itself, so we have yet to see sort of secondary cases. So it’s somewhat reassuring. But we still don’t completely understand all the ways that it transmits.

This virus could still transmit through the air. We’re not talking about, you know, COVID-like virus that is very, very transmissible, but the hantavirus Andes variant has been known in the past to spread among people in close contact but also in situations like a party, where there was, you know, people just talking to each other in an enclosed space.

But the general public probably isn’t going to encounter it anytime soon, hopefully. It’s more of a concern for people who had contact with individuals who were on that ship.

Feltman: And speaking of that sort of contact tracing, what do we know about what various government entities are doing to make sure that everyone who did have potential contact is aware, and what kind of advice are those people getting?

Lewis: So here in the U.S. there are, I believe it’s 15 or 16 people who are quarantining in a facility in Nebraska. This is actually the only facility of its kind in the country. It’s a special facility because the rooms are sort of outfitted with HEPA filters and they are what’s called negative air pressure rooms. So if there’s a leak of any kind, it’ll come into the room rather than out.

And that’s just a precaution because if any of these passengers do show symptoms, then they could quickly be contained and moved to the biocontainment unit, which is more like a hospital setting.

And then most countries that have had passengers from this cruise ship return are taking it quite seriously.

Feltman: So what do the next few weeks look like?

Lewis: So I think we’re going to probably just be continuing to monitor these passengers. We may still see more positive cases because hantavirus has a very long incubation period. I think it can be up to as many as 42 days. It’s too soon to say that, like, we’ve seen the last of the cases, but I think it’s at least encouraging that we’ve seen limited spread.

Feltman: Thanks, Tanya! Listeners, remember to check ScientificAmerican.com for more up-to-date news.

Our next story features a health condition that many of you are likely familiar with, but it has a snazzy new name. The artist formerly known as polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS for short, will now go by polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS.

That change comes courtesy of a policy paper published last Tuesday in the Lancet in which a global science consortium broke down the inaccuracy of the historically used term. The new name is based on thousands of patient surveys and the input of 56 medical and patient societies.

PCOS has actually always been a kind of misnomer for this condition, which the World Health Organization estimates affects up to 13 percent of women worldwide. The “cysts” referred to in the original name are actually follicles that would normally mature and release eggs but instead sit in arrested development. They’re entirely different from the types of ovarian cysts that can cause pain or even rupture and sometimes require surgery.

But beyond that semantic cyst confusion, there’s the fact that many people who have been diagnosed with PCOS in the past due to their levels of the hormone androgen and i