Here we go again, or maybe not. The World Health Organisation is reassuring us that the public health risk from hantavirus is low, after the outbreak on a cruise ship. Hantaviruses are a classic zoonosis: caught from animals. You have to inhale dust containing infected rodent droppings or – in the case of this Andean variant, which has shown limited human-to-human transmission before – to have close and prolonged contact with somebody who has already caught the virus. That means being coughed on, not just sharing the same air in a room.

Trouble is, of course, WHO said the same about Covid. For three whole months they went on insisting ‘Covid-19 is NOT airborne’, the upper-case letters being theirs, not mine. They were wrong, badly so. They cried ‘sheep’ when it was a wolf. They trashed their own reputation so lots of people will no longer trust them.

Yet in this case I suspect they will........

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