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The History of Hantavirus and Why You’re Reading a Lot About It in 2025
It’s everywhere in the news, so let me share its history along with a story of my own.
When I was a medical technology student at UT El Paso, one of my professors took us out to the desert in northern Mexico to do a survey of the people there. It wasn’t just any survey, though. We were armed with blood collection kits to take samples from people who agreed to participate in the study. It was a “seroprevalence study,” meaning we were looking for what types of antibodies people had in their blood.
We were looking for immunoglobulin G (IgG) and immunoglobulin M (IgM) antibodies against hantavirus. The type G antibodies would tell us if the person had been previously exposed to hantavirus, and the type M antibodies would tell us if the exposure happened recently. (Click here to read more about how antibodies appear during and after an infection.) After taking several dozen samples—including some from a Mexican military installation—we crossed the international border into New Mexico.
Once in Columbus, New Mexico, we randomly selected some more households to interview and collect samples from. In the end, we had over 100 samples randomly taken from a large area in the desert on the border of the United States and Mexico…
