History and Major Outbreaks of Hantavirus

During the Korean War in the early 1950s, roughly 3,200 United Nations soldiers stationed near the Hantan River fell ill with a puzzling illness that would later be identified as hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome. At the time, its cause was unknown.

Korean virologist Ho Wang Lee identified the responsible virus in 1976 and achieved its first isolation in 1978. It was named Hantaan virus in 1980, after the river near the original outbreak. The World Health Organization formally designated the associated illness "hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome" in 1982.

Lee's team went on to develop Hantavax, the first hantavirus vaccine. The first paper describing it was published in 1988, and the South Korean government licensed it in 1990. It targets Hantaan-type Old World strains and has not seen wide use outside Korea.

In 1993, an unexplained cluster of severe, often fatal respiratory illness appeared in the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States, where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. Investigators traced it to a previously unknown hantavirus, later named Sin Nombre virus ("virus without a name"), carried by deer mice.

This was the first identification of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome as a distinct disease in the Americas. The outbreak has been linked to a boom in the deer mouse population following a wet season driven by El Niño conditions.

Additional New World hantaviruses, including Andes virus in South America, and dozens of Old World species have since been characterized. Hantaviruses are now recognized as a public health concern wherever their rodent hosts live alongside people — from farms and forests to campgrounds, cabins, and homes.