On May 7, 2026, Scientific American reported that an outbreak of Andes hantavirus aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius was believed to have caused three deaths. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said eight cases had been reported, five of them confirmed, and called the incident serious, but “stressed that the public health risk is low because the Andes hantavirus does not appear to pass between humans easily.” Passengers who disembarked before the first suspected case, including people from at least six U.S. states (California, Arizona, Texas, New Jersey, Georgia and Virginia), were being monitored; California said there was no indication any of its residents were infected.
In June 2025, about 11 months earlier, the National Institutes of Health had shut down all 10 Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID), a network launched in 2020 with a projected $82 million to study pathogens that could jump from animals to people. A June 5, 2025 stop-work order said the network's research “has been deemed unsafe for Americans and not a good use of taxpayer funding. Current agency priorities do not support this work.” Virologist David Wang of Washington University, who led one center, called the safety claim “totally unsubstantiated.”
One casualty of the shutdown was a pilot project run by a group in Argentina and funded through the West African Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases (WAC-EID), which “was designed to better understand how hantavirus passes from rodents to humans.” The center's former principal investigator, Scott Weaver, said around $100,000 would likely have gone to the Argentina study. According to Grant Witness records, almost $2.4 million of WAC-EID's more than $8.3 million in NIH funding had yet to be paid out when the funding was cut. Andes virus is the one hantavirus known to spread between people, but experts know little about how. Scientific American wrote that “the Argentina project almost certainly would not have prevented the outbreak onboard the Hondius.” Weaver argued that such cuts still leave the world more exposed: “We're not in a good position to say [hantavirus], just because it's never caused big outbreaks, doesn't have the potential to do that one day.”
Update (October 2, 2026): By May 15, the WHO counted 10 cases, eight confirmed and two probable, and the CDC said none of the 41 Americans under monitoring had tested positive for the Andes strain. The Institut Pasteur notes that the severe cardiopulmonary syndrome caused mainly by New World hantaviruses has a case fatality rate “that can reach 30 to 60%.”
Correction (October 2, 2026): This entry previously said the cancelled pilot project studied human-to-human hantavirus transmission through saliva and aerosol droplets, and that the cut removed funding “that would have prepared the U.S. for this exact event.” Scientific American reported that the project was designed to study how hantavirus passes from rodents to humans and that it “almost certainly would not have prevented the outbreak.” The entry also gave a 30-50% Andes fatality range without a source and omitted the WHO's low-risk assessment. The title, summary and key facts have been corrected, and a paragraph listing unrelated public-health actions that this entry's sources did not document was removed.