Methodology.

Hantaviruses are a family of rodent-borne RNA viruses that, in humans, can cause two distinct syndromes: hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) — primarily in the Americas — and hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) — primarily in Eurasia. Transmission is usually airborne, through aerosolised rodent droppings, urine, or saliva. Person-to-person transmission is rare but documented for the Andes virus in South America.

Cases are uncommon but the case-fatality rate for HPS is historically high (~30–40%). For that reason, even a small number of confirmed reports tends to draw significant public attention, which in turn produces a flood of secondary coverage of variable quality.

1. 01

   Gather

   We continuously monitor official health-authority bulletins (WHO, CDC, ECDC, regional ministries of health) and reputable news outlets for new hantavirus reports. Every source carries a trust rating, and that rating follows the report through the rest of the pipeline.

2. 02

   Read & summarise

   Each new article is canonicalised, deduplicated, and read in full to extract the case type, location, severity, affected counts, and a short summary — together with a confidence score that reflects how clearly the article supports each conclusion.

3. 03

   Locate

   Place names are resolved to map coordinates through a real geocoder; we never use guessed lat/lng. When a city or region is named, the marker lands there. When only a country is named, the marker falls back to the country.

4. 04

   Publish or review

   High-confidence reports from authoritative sources publish to the atlas immediately. Lower-confidence reports — and anything from a less-authoritative outlet — are held in a human moderation queue. Approval, edit, and rejection decisions are append-only and audited.

5. 05

   Serve

   The atlas is served from a CDN with aggressive caching, so even at peak load it stays fast. Pages refresh on a short cycle to surface new reports without overloading the underlying sources.

This is informational only — not medical advice.For specific guidance, consult your local public-health authority. The bullets below summarise widely recommended precautions and are not a substitute for clinical judgment.

• ✺Reduce rodent harborage near homes — seal gaps, clear brush, store food in rodent-proof containers.
• ✺Ventilate enclosed spaces (cabins, sheds) before cleaning if rodents may have nested there.
• ✺Wet-clean droppings and nests with a disinfectant solution; avoid dry sweeping or vacuuming.
• ✺Wear gloves and a fitted respirator when handling potentially contaminated material.
• ✺Seek medical attention promptly for fever and shortness of breath within ~6 weeks of suspected rodent exposure.

Source identifiers, trust tiers, and ingestion timestamps are attached to every report. We list the underlying article ID on each report page so the original reporting can be inspected directly.

Health-authority bulletins always outrank news aggregators in our classification. When a story originates from a Tier-2 or Tier-3 outlet, it sits in moderation until it can be cross-referenced against an authoritative source.

The aggregated catalog (case-type counts, geographic distribution, timestamps) is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0). Underlying article text remains the property of its publisher — we link to the original instead of redistributing.

Spotted an error in a report? Have a source we should be polling? Want to flag a takedown request? We’d like to hear about it.

Email hello@hantaviruswatcher.com with the report URL or a clear description, and we’ll route it to a human moderator.