Virologists on hantavirus, and extreme heat at the World Cup

Speaker 10:00

[on-hold music] All engines running. [laughing] Absolute genius. Get this. Welcome. Welcome. [laughing] This is the show where we bring you science. What that essentially means is... Discoveries. Advances. Questions. Research. Technology. Unbelievable. Without further ado... This is The Naked Scientists.

Chris Smith· Host0:15

Hello, welcome to The Naked Scientists podcast, the program that brings you the biggest breakthroughs and talks to the major movers and shakers in the worlds of science, technology, and medicine. I'm Chris Smith, and coming up, we review what happened with the cruise ship hantavirus outbreak, remarkable new insights into how our smell sense is organized in our noses, and the Trump administration releases a tranche of UFO files. So what's in them? [theme music] First this week, let's catch up with what happened with the recent outbreak of hantavirus aboard the MV Hondius, the expedition ship carrying 150 people that left Argentina at the beginning of April, but has since seen a number of passengers and crew struck down with this infection. Now, virologists often name new viruses after where they were first found. Zika virus, for instance, was initially described in Uganda's Zika forest, while the Ebola River, flowing through what's now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, needs no explanation for the dread disease that was documented there. Hantaviruses are chips off the same block.

Colin Crump· Soundbite1:26

The original name of the virus family comes from the first one that was isolated