Yesterday, almost 2,000 people, mostly young children, died of malaria because they could not access effective and relatively cheap treatment quickly enough. About 4,000 people died of tuberculosis (TB), including many young adults leaving orphans. This happens every day. Progress in reducing these numbers is stalling, as partly due to the continuing economic damage from the Covid-19 response. 

In the past two weeks three tourists unfortunately died among about 150 passengers and crew on a cruise ship MV Hondius off the west coast of the African continent where most of those malaria and TB deaths occurred. The Hondius had a hantavirus outbreak, known to have infected less than 10 people but including at least two of those that died.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 10,000 to 100,000 hantavirus cases occur every year, spread across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The current media coverage and WHO news conferences therefore concern about one-thousandth of the cases expected this year. The United States averages about 30 – they simply have not been newsworthy.

Hantavirus is transmitted from mice and rats through their feces, urine, saliva, or their bite. The Andean variety, which occurred on the cruise ship, can also sometimes transmit from a sick infected person. However, as the low number of cases on the ship demonstrates, the risk of human-human transmission is not great. It is, however, a nasty virus, with reported mortality around 15% of cases and sometimes significantly higher.

So, among the 170,000 average deaths in the world each day, and thousands from the........

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