"In 2025 the Trump administration eliminated funding for a group that had been running a pilot project aimed at studying the type of hantavirus that has been confirmed to be behind an ongoing outbreak on a cruise ship. The outbreak is now believed to have caused the deaths of three people and sickened several more. The virus has potentially spread beyond the ship because there were passengers who disembarked during the voyage before the first suspected case came to light; five U.S. states are now monitoring for the pathogen."
"The pilot project was designed to better understand how hantavirus passes from rodents to humans and was being conducted through the West African Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases (WAC-EID), one of 10 centers that comprised the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) network. All 10 centers were shuttered last year after the National Institutes of Health decided the research was unsafe. The WAC-EID primarily studied diseases in Senegal, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, and many of these illnesses were borne by rodents."
"We found out that there was a group in Argentina that wanted to do similar kinds of things that we were doing in West Africa, says Scott Weaver, WAC-EID's former principal investigator and a professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch. We supported them to put in an application for a pilot award, and they did that, and they were reviewed, and they were successful in getting funded."
"Most recorded hantavirus cases are contracted through direct exposure to rodents and their feces and urinenot through human-to-human transmission. The exception is a pathogen in this family of viruses called the Andes virusfor which several people who were"
A pilot project studying hantavirus transmission from rodents to humans lost funding in 2025. The work was linked to an outbreak on a cruise ship, where hantavirus is believed to have caused three deaths and sickened several others. The virus may have spread beyond the ship because some passengers disembarked before the first suspected case was identified, leading five U.S. states to monitor for the pathogen. The pilot project was conducted through WAC-EID, part of the CREID network. All CREID centers were shut down after NIH determined the research was unsafe. WAC-EID focused on rodent-borne diseases in Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria, and supported a similar effort in Argentina through a pilot award process.
#hantavirus #public-health #infectious-disease-research #outbreak-investigation #rodent-borne-transmission
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