Let me just state this up front. I am not really a cruise person.

The idea of sealing myself inside a boat with a bunch of strangers has always seemed fraud.

Maybe it's because I watched too many reruns of Gilligan's Island growing up. In the last

few years, norovirus outbreaks have not made me feel any less entitled to my opinion. So over the last

couple of weeks, when I heard about a wildlife cruise, where a form of hauntavirus seemed to be

spreading, I thought, oh no, but also, of course. Now that the cruise is

over, I called up Catherine Wu from over the Atlantic to ask, how worried should all of us be

about this outbreak? It was the first weekend of May when the first confirmed case of hauntavirus was reported from the ship.

And I think that is about the time the pastures on the ship found out as well, at least most of them.

Did you immediately think, uh-oh, this is going to be a problem?

Not really.

My first thought was, wow, that really sucks.

The person on board is probably not going to have a good time.

We do worry about the people who actually get infected because some versions of

Hunter virus can have up to roughly 50% fatality rate, and that is

absolutely no joke. But certainly my first thought was not, oh, giant outbreak, the world is in

trouble. You can hear how the facts have a way of fighting each other, right? Like the mortality

rate is high. In fact, three out of the 150 passengers on this cruise have died.

And when this boat, the M.V. Hondias, pulled up to its final destination, the head of the

World Health Organization was there to personally oversee what happened next. He told the press,

there was no need to panic. This was not another COVID. But the local government did not want passengers sticking around. They put them in hazmat suits and hustled them onto waiting planes.

Catherine says, there was a good reason for the rush. There's no cure for Honda virus. There's no specific treatment. We just try and keep them from getting worse,

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