By Prof. Dr. Dragan Danilovski
Hantavirus has these days become the new raw material for the global industry of fear.
A single isolated incident on a cruise ship in the South Atlantic was enough for the online space to once again explode with apocalyptic scenarios, “predictions,” mysterious posts from the past, suspicions of global agendas, and recycled theories about controlling humanity.
Almost automatically, the same words began circulating again: pandemic, control, depopulation, mRNA, “1984”…
As if there is a ready-made template activated every time the name of a virus appears in the media.
Meanwhile, the public is gradually ceasing to distinguish between epidemiology and algorithmically manufactured fear.
Particularly concerning is the fact that, in such an atmosphere, even healthcare professionals sometimes actively participate. Their publicly spoken word carries enormous weight because the title “doctor” stands next to their name.
After the COVID pandemic, society remained psychologically hypersensitive to topics related to infectious diseases.
A few dramatic formulations, a few unfinished insinuations, and one photograph with a laboratory setting are enough to reactivate in part of the population the feeling that “something is being prepared.”
In such a context, the public communication of the medical profession is no longer a private matter — casual café talk.
Social networks have (already) become mass media.
And algorithms reward fear.
Hantaviruses, meanwhile, are not a new phenomenon that suddenly appeared yesterday in a laboratory.
They have long been known in medicine. They represent a group of viruses associated with rodents, which serve as their natural reservoir. Humans are most commonly infected through contact with aerosols contaminated with feces, urine, or saliva from infected rodents.
Some of them are present on the European continent, in Asia, and in Africa (the subgroup of Old World Hantaviruses). The Balkans are an endemic area.
Another part of them (the subgroup of New World Hantaviruses) “rules” across both Americas. Argentina and Chile are endemic areas.
Although the two subgroups are related, they differ in that they cause different types of disease in human hosts.
Viruses in the New World subgroup cause a disease known as “hantavirus pulmonary syndrome,” with dozens of cases each year and a mortality rate of 20–40%.
Viruses in the Old World subgroup cause a disease known as “hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome,” with hundreds of cases each year and a mortality rate of 1–15%.
The Balkans have their own experience with hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome.
Within the New World subgroup exists the Andes virus type (the cause of the outbreak on the cruise ship “Hondius”).
Only in this type has human-to-human transmission been documented!
Very important! That virus does not circulate here. Nor is there a risk of it “jumping” from any of the infected people on the cruise ship.
Because of this, at the moment there are no indications of a scenario resembling the COVID pandemic.
At the same time, there are real reasons for caution.
The topic of hantaviruses opens a very down-to-earth and local question: what is the state of urban hygiene, deratization, and rodent control in Macedonian cities?
In the recent period, Skopje and other areas have faced serious waste-management problems. Containers overflowing for days. Piles of garbage along streets. Scattered organic waste. Illegal dumpsites.
A 21st-century “miasma”!
Such conditions inevitably create an environment favorable for the expansion of rat and mouse populations, which represent a potential reservoir for several infectious diseases, including hantavirus infections.
That is precisely why the threshold of summer is the moment when institutions should seriously approach:
– deratization;
– disinfection;
– sanitary inspection;
– urban hygiene;
– control of illegal dumpsites.
For reasons of elementary epidemiological logic.
It is high time we learned to distinguish between a real public health risk and an internet fantasy that feeds on collective fear.
What the public needs today are accurate information, sobriety, and prevention.
We do not need a new panic.