English 'sweate' (Sudor Anglicus) and Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, The

British Journal of Biomedical Science, 2001 by Bridson, Eric

The exact role of rodents in initiating the disease and maintaining the infection is not clear, and further work on this aspect of the disease is required. More difficult is speculation about the circumstances that controlled whether the victims lived or died. This was not a disease that hit the malnourished, the old or very young. It culled its victims from a particularly healthy portion of the population. Was the immune state of these victims very different from the general population, as is suggested by exposure of the poor to rodent infestation?

Finally, the mysterious disappearance of the disease after 1551 has yet to be explained. Did the disease continue in ever-smaller epidemics that were totally unrecorded when in competition with the big plagues of those times? Did a special rodent population, essential for the virus, eventually become extinct?

The best mysteries are never solved and each new generation of investigators brings its newly discovered scientific theories to bear, in an attempt to explain the past. This paper is an example of it in action; HPS virus is a solution that is almost right but it does not completely fit the epidemiological past. There remains room for more work and more theories.

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