Mrs Unleashed 🦋🐶🦭🦔🦡

How it’s started. How it’s going.

Explaining lettuce to an American:

Food from this region of the world 😮‍💨

Here's the problem I see with how the hantavirus outbreak is being handled... While everyone is fighting over direct human-to-human spread via airborne transmission, this is not the normal method of transmission. Normally, it's transmitted via aerosolized dried rat waste, which, btw, means it's always been airborne. But this also means that humans infected with hantavirus are creating infected human waste. Some countries are gathering it for disposal, and others are not. See, we could easily say hantavirus is endemic in rat populations worldwide, and all that separates the normal kind and the human-to-human kind is THREE amino acid changes. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins... so really small changes. We have already seen animal reservoirs develop for SARS2, when infected human waste makes its way into animal drinking water... And pumping Andes hantavirus into normal wastewater systems, where it will expose the local rat population, seems like a great way for us to establish endemic Andes variants of hantavirus in regions where hantavirus, a BSL-4 pathogen, was not normally transmissible between humans. SARS2 is a BSL-3, but BSL-2 protections are incorrectly allowed by the WHO. Hantavirus is a BSL-4, and that's as high as the scale goes. The possibility of the Andes variant replacing current endemic variants that are not human-to-human is on the table, and we have never had this variant in so many places at once, ever. There is the potential to screw this up in ways that are hard to conceptualize, and other countries are collecting the infected human waste because they know this is a possible outcome. So, no, this is not another COVID... It could actually be much worse. And the chances of it getting worse increase with every mishandling.