The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Another Virus to Worry About?

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

What can a rare hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship tell us about broader public health risks, and are there warning signs closer to home that we may be overlooking? After a Dutch vessel was linked to the Andes strain, questions emerge about how such diseases spread, what makes them dangerous, and whether other threats, including tick-borne illnesses, are already taking hold. We examine what is known about hantavirus, how it compares to more familiar risks, and what it could signal about shifting patterns in human and environmental health. Dr. Fahad Razak, an internist and epidemiologist at St. Michael's Hospital, looks at the implications for surveillance, preparedness, and public awareness. We then turn to a different kind of signal: the ways animals respond to changing conditions. If animals are constantly communicating, what might humans be missing, and could those observations offer insight into environmental change? Amelia Thomas, journalist and author of "What Sheep Think About the Weather," explores how animals interpret their surroundings, what their behaviours might reveal, and whether learning to pay closer attention could deepen our understanding of the forces shaping both animal and human health.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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slash TVO arts to make your donation today. Your gift is matched up to $100,000. Hi, I'm Nam Kiwanuka, host and producer of Mestreated, a podcast on women's health. There just hasn't been a lot of money put into researching women's health issues. If women are in pain, it's hysteria, it's an emotional issue. And this is what we see consistently. Women's health is not.

not taken seriously. How did we get here? Find us wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to check out the video version of the show on the TVO Today YouTube channel. Hope to see you then. How worried should we be about Hanta virus? There's a question that's been everywhere since a cruise ship outbreak that's been linked to at least 11 cases, including one Canadian and three deaths so far. And it makes sense. Six years after COVID threw everything into chaos, people are concerned about what kind of damage another virus could cause. So, what do we know about Hanta virus? Well, it's been around for centuries, but the first documented outbreak happened in the 1950s during the Korean War. 20 years later, scientists linked it to wild rodents. And it turns out, though, that one type, the Andes

strain can also spread person to person. And that's what caused the cruise ship outbreak. Does this change the risk profile? Well, we break down what the science says and separate myth from facts. from the hantavirus and on other global public health threats like Ebola. And the threats you're more likely to face in your own backyard. Then, the natural world has its share of threats, but it's also full of mystery and wonder. We talked to an author and farmer who decided to investigate what animals might be trying to tell us. This is the rundown. The Dutch cruise ship at the center of the outbreak was hit by a specific kind of hantavirus,

the Andy string. So what do we know about it? And what do we know about a whole other threat that could be right in our own backyard? Dr. Fahad Razak is an internist and epidemiologist at St. Michael's Hospital, an associate professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto. And he joins us in studio. Great to have you here, Doctor. How are you doing? Great to be with you. All right. Hansavirus. It's pretty new for a lot of us, but it comes with a mix of fear and misinformation. So I'm hoping that you can help cut through the noise, walk us through what's true or what's false. What do you think? Absolutely. All right. True or false? You can catch antivirus from insects like mosquitoes, ticks or fleas. So that is false. Most hantavirus

is spread through rodent waste. So for example, let's say you had a shed in rural British Columbia, the waste that's in there, you're cleaning it, it gets into the air. That's how you get it. The thing that's slightly new about the new version of hontovirus, the Andes virus, is there are some cases now where it can from human to human. Okay. True or false? Antivirus is a respiratory illness with early symptoms similar to the flu. That's true. In the majority of cases, the first symptoms are flu-like symptoms. It's things like fever, chills, fatigue, headache. Then it progresses to a very severe respiratory illness for most people. There is also a version that gives you more severe kidney disease. All right. True or false? Hantavirus spreads easily from person to person contact.

So that's false. Up till the Andes virus, in fact, a hanta virus does not spread from person to person, only from a mouse or rodent, for example, to humans. The anties virus version can spread to humans and human from human to human, but it's in this unusual circumstance of intense, prolonged personal contact like a cruise ship. So we would classify as Zuton. Zuton. Yeah, zoonotic, correct. All right. Yeah. True or false? Antivirus has the potential to become the next COVID. Yeah. Thankfully, false. Everything we know about Hanta virus and the Andy strain suggests that it does not have pandemic potential. It doesn't spread easily through the air.

Importantly, people who are minimally symptomatic can't spread it forward. So one of the big challenges with COVID was that people didn't really have symptoms, but they were already spreading it to others so you could have a lot of spread. We also don't have a virus that rapidly mutates like COVID. It's very stable, so it doesn't develop those new variants that we struggled with. All right. True or false, antivirus can be diagnosed by a blood test. That is true. The blood tests principally works on two different ways. The first is it looks for the genetic material of the virus, or it looks for your antibodies responding to the virus.

Question on that. Can, are these blood tests pretty easy to get? They're not something that you would get in a family medicine office, for example, but we have a coordinated way through our public health units and through the central lab in Winnipeg, where we have an ability nationally to rapidly get an answer to whether someone is positive or negative. you saw that in British Columbia over the last week. And that would be something that you would have to, not just something that you get at your pharmacist or GP. Correct. Correct. This is not a pharmacist GP test. This is a hospital specialized test. That's right. True or false, antivirus has a 20% to 40% mortality rate.

Yeah, it does. It's a very, very significant infection once it occurs, and it's primarily through that very severe lung impact. So people will have deteriorating lung function, not able to absorb oxygen, go into hospital, be on a ventilator. and unfortunately about 30% of them die. Can you compare that to, say, COVID? I think a lot of people, when we heard about hansomavirus, that's where our brains went.

How does that compare to COVID? So dramatically different. So in COVID it would be under 1% for the general population. So this is a very, very different disease. COVID spreads very easily. The impact for COVID was that societal, many people getting infected.

So even 1%, let's say, is a big number. Here, it's very rarely spread. But when you do get infected, it's very severe. True or false. something you can do to stop the spread of hantavirus? In fact, there's a lot that can be done. So remember, again, hauntavirus has been around for decades.

We know that it's a rodent spread disease. And things that you can do include preventing rodent exposure. So for example, many Canadians live in rural settings. If you have rodents in your shed or in your garage, there's a lot of strategies you could do. You could plug all the holes. You can get an eradication service. You close water and food so they don't have a food source.

And then if you're cleaning up the droppings, for example, you can wear a good mask, like a rest of respirator, N95, and also you try and prevent it from getting into the air, so you wet it down first and clean it before you, let's say, vacuum it. All right, doctor, thank you for helping make sense of all of that. Now, with the warmer weather finally here, everyone is getting outdoors a lot more. So let's clear up some true or false things. People hear about ticks. I should mention that I should lift my socks over my pants because I feel like anytime we talk about ticks, I get a little bit Itchy? True or false? Ticks jump or fall from trees?

False. So ticks do not fly. They, in fact, crawl onto leaves or long grasses, and they spread through that direct contact. Let's say you're walking by the brush. The grass hits your exposed calf, and then the tick gets onto your leg. All right. True or false? Ticks are only found deep in the woods. False. In fact, many parts of urban Toronto where you have grass right up against houses, for example, would have exposure to ticks. Is there particular places where we'll see them more versus not? Should we stay away from grass? Yeah, it's hard to stay away. I think it's more important to do the appropriate precautions.

So we say, you know, when you're going out into the brush, let's say you're going into a meadow or you're going to a park, wearing longer clothing, having it well tucked in, treating it with insect repellent. And then when you come back in, doing an examination to see if you have ticks, because one of the most important risk factors of whether you get sick is how long that tick stays on your body. And we're talking backyards as well, yeah.

Blackyards as well, that's right. True or false? Ticks can be found year round even in winter. They can. And unfortunately with climate change, this is a worsening phenomenon. So our winters are getting warmer. That's objectively true. And with that, ticks can extend out the air lifespan within Canada. So yes, year round, for example, on a mild winter day, there can be ticks outside. True or false? All tick bites lead to Lyme disease. That's false. Lime disease is what we worry about. but in fact it is a rare outcome from a tick bite. The majority of tick bites don't cause Lyme disease, but because it is a significant disease,

you always want to be cautious. Are there any other diseases that we should be worried about when comes to ticks? Yeah, in fact, there's many diseases. We talk about this with our medical students in hospital. I won't list all the Latin names for you, but Lyme disease is one specific disease we worry about in a broader family of diseases

that are tick-borne. True or false. You will always get a bullseye rash if you are infected with Lyme disease. That's false, but it is. the most common way that Lyme disease does start. So about 80% of people who will develop Lyme disease get that first red, rash, circular rash

around the area where the bite occurs. But unfortunately, not all people present that way. And so this is where if you've had a bite, be cautious and look out for those symptoms like a flu-like illness immediately afterwards and then progressive other symptoms as time goes by. True or false, there are over 40 tick species in Ontario. There are, but not all of them spread Lyme disease.

But ticks are a very common insect, that's right. True or false, if you get bitten by a tick, it is best to leave it as is. Definite false. So, in fact, we know that getting that tick off your body sooner helps reduce the risk that you will develop illness like Lyme. So this is why we say immediately after coming in from outdoors, this is when you do that tick inspection. If you see a tick, then removing it with a pair of tweezers, pulling it straight out, cleaning the area with alcohol, and then checking to see if you get an infection afterwards. So it should initially hurt a little bit.

but then afterwards the skin should clear up. If it then turns red or something else, that's when you should seek medical attention. All right. I want to mention my father-in-law. He has been now, I think he has shown us photos of six ticks that have been crawling through his body since the weather has been warming up.

And he has talked about antibiotics. Yes. Is there a solution? What can people do? Is that the first place that they should go if they see a tick, even just crawling on them, whether or not we know it's been them or not? Yeah, no.

So definitely we don't give antibiotics routinely for a tick bite. And getting antibiotics just because you've seen a tick on your body is not the right approach. Removing that tick, the strategies to prevent further ticks, long clothing, insect treatment, tick inspections. And then if you do get a tick bite and you're worried about it potentially being infected or something else, that's when you should seek medical attention. And there a doctor can help you determine are you someone who would benefit from further treatment? Should we be keeping that tick with us to take to a medical professional?

That's right. You can keep it with you, bring it along, show them that can always be helpful. All right, doctor, thanks for walking us through that. Really helpful as we head into the warmer months. Now, as we talk about warmer months and what's happening in the headlines right now, I do want to talk, there are some worrying reports of an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. How worried are you right now? Is this as bad as it was, say, in 2014, when we're talking pretty large numbers of people who died?

Yeah, look, this is a very worrying outbreak. It has the hallmarks of what could look like a catastrophic outbreak. So, as you said, in 2014, 30,000 people infected, over 10,000 deaths. This infection, this outbreak looks worrying because it's probably been spreading for a lot longer than we realized. It's in an extraordinarily poor area with very little surveillance, but a lot of crowding. Migrant workers who are going into the mines and agriculture who are moving between communities. And so far, the number of tests we're doing are coming back at a higher rate of positive than we would expect suggesting that there's a lot of infections spreading in the community that we're not detecting.

It's a very significant illness. And when it hits an area like this, I should add the other factor is there's a civil war actively in this region. So getting health care workers in is very challenging. When you have all of these things coming together, that is unfortunately the critical risk factors for an explosive infection and an outbreak. And the reason why the World Health Organization called an emergency so quickly is they are seeing significant worry. Is there a chance that we should be worried here?

We should be surveilling for people coming in who potentially could be exposed, but the conditions that are required for Ebola to spread between people don't really exist in Canada. So this is not a risk for us here in Canada. It's something we should keep an eye on, but it is potentially something that could kill thousands to tens of thousands of people, if not controlled. As you mentioned, monitoring people who are coming in. As you know, it's a big summer here in this city, in this province, in about a month, we're hosting the FIFA World Cup.

What precautions should people be taking to maximize, or minimize rather, the spread of potentially infectious diseases? Yeah, look, I think all of us are delighted that we're going to be hosting this really important event for the world. But we know historically that any mass human gathering, the Hodge, festivals in India, sporting events, these can be places where infectious disease outbreaks occur. And so definitely there has to be caution as you host something like this. Actually, this has been looked at very carefully by public health units, including here in Toronto, the Ontario government and federally. And right now, the virus or disease they worry about the most is measles.

Why? Because we know that Canadian rates of vaccination are lower than they historically have been. We saw that sustained transmission of measles over the last couple of years in Canada. You're not going to have thousands or tens of thousands of people come in. They potentially could introduce new cases of measles. And we have a large number of people who are susceptible. Most important thing you can do, get your vaccines up to date. So we historically have been a very traveled place here in Canada.

We have a lot of visitors. We haven't had measles outbreaks. It's because the population was vaccinated. We have a low vaccination rate. So don't look out on the world and say, oh, it could come in from there, say what can I do to protect myself? If we had the Minister of Health sitting across from us right now, and you had a short little conversation,

I am curious, what's one thing you would like her to prioritize? As we talk sort of about infectious diseases, We got a big summer. We talk about pandemic preparedness. What's one thing you would like her to know? Yeah, I would say that the last couple of years building on the pandemic have shown us that these illnesses, when they are tightly managed,

can have minimal impact on people's health, happiness, society. But when they get out of control, they can be kind of catastrophic. And so right now the response requires, I think, that kind of coordination to prevent the propagation of infection. And let's use measles as an example. We don't know where,

vaccinated people are in this province. So you, me, my kids, we're all still using yellow vaccine cards, right? But think about how sophisticated our phones are. It's crazy, frankly, that we don't just have a digital record of whether you're vaccinated or not to help us get people protected who need protection. So there are simple coordinated strategies like that. The technology is there. I think it's a matter of will. And I was, you know, grateful to see the chief medical officers report last year highlighted this as one of the critical issues. Just a vaccine registry could be an incredible advance for protecting Ontarians. Doctor, we are going to leave it there.

We covered a lot there. I really appreciate you taking the time to help us better understand all this. Yeah, great to be with you. Animals communicate with each other in all kinds of ways, but they also communicate with us. So what are they saying?

And could we learn to listen better? Naturalist and journalist Amelia Thomas is the author of What Sheep Think About the Weather, How to Listen to What Animals Are Trying to Say? She joins us in our studios. How are you doing? I'm good. Thank you. How are you? I'm doing well. Great to have you in our studios. Could you start by giving us a little background on how you ended up on a farm in Nova Scotia?

Is farming in your blood? My family, for generations, like hundreds of years were farmers. And then my dad was the first one who said, I don't want to live on a farm. I want to live in the suburbs. So I sort of grew up this suburban child who desperately wanted to be a farmer. And so I sort of brought home as many animals as I could from every. Everywhere that I found and my poor parents, you know, pigeons that I found or, you know, stray cats and rabbits and guinea pigs, anything I was sort of allowed to bring in. And then, and I'm a journalist, so we worked sort of all over the world.

I've worked in lots of different places. And finally, a couple of years ago, managed to settle down and buy a farm. So it's a bit dilapidated. Yeah, now we have our own. And that farm is in... It's in Nova Scotia. Why Nova Scotia? Nova Scotia.

reminds me of the kind of farming communities that my grandparents lived in, you know, in Wales in the 1970s and 80s, reminds me of that's still very old-fashioned, strong community. All right. One of the things that you talk about in those early chapters is about those animals that you mentioned sort of on the farm, the dog, the piglets, and sort of how they are trying to communicate to you. When did you first notice that they were trying to talk to you? So I think anyone who's had a pet knows these moments where you're like, what are you trying to say? Or you have moments where you really do know what your animal's trying to say.

I had a moment the day we moved into the farm, everything went wrong, the piglets were escaping, the horses were screaming at each other. There was a hummingbird, like dive bombing me when I was sitting on our front doorstep. And I thought, okay, you know, this is a question that's bothered me for a long time. I'm going to spend a year, first year on the farm, and I'm going to really dig into what these animals are all trying to say to me that I might not be noticing. Now, noticing that they're trying to tell you something is one thing,

but how did you actually teach herself to understand what they were saying? So the first thing that I thought would be useful because it's such a big subject was sort of to break it up. So I was like, okay, there are scientists who are working on that topic. There are animal trainers in all different spheres. And then there's sort of the people who fall into a bit more of an intuitive category, like trackers, and then animal communicators. So there's sort of that world as well.

So I thought I'm going to go from science to like animal communication at the other end of the spectrum and talk to as many people as I can and listen to animals themselves in as many different ways as I can and sort of just and then practice things on my own little sort of experimental animals at home. All right. Well, you mentioned you talk to a number of artists. I want to dig into some of the things that you learned from them. I'm going to start with one that I didn't think would be in the realm of animals that you would kind of consider. But cockroaches and fruit flies. something that you mentioned quite early, not exactly on many people's favorite lists,

but what did you learn about them? It's actually the stuff that I learned is pretty mind-blowing. I took to people who are working with these animals that, you know, these tiny little creatures that we think of as identical and learned that actually they have individuality. So I talked to a neuroscientist from Oxford University who said that even if you clone fruit flies,

they act differently to each other. And you would expect that their behavior would be identical, right? because they seem to be identical. But no, their brain wiring means that they act slightly differently from each other. So they have individuality. They have many things in common with this, which I didn't realize. Like what? Like they have memories.

They remember bad things, good things and act accordingly. They get dopamine rushes. So like we do, you know, when we're feeling something good. They dislike bitter taste, like sweet things. Some prefer things to others. So some will fly like two, a sense. whereas others will fly away. Some will choose to sort of always go left

if they're put in a maze and some will go right. And that's sort of over, you can put them in different situations and they'll still act according to their kind of rudimentary personalities. And cockroaches, yeah, this cockroach researcher that I spoke to in Japan said the same thing about cockroaches. So that was really stunning. Even these teeny creatures have things in common with us. Let's go to Montreal because that's where you learned about some chimpanzees

that were at a sanctuary there. What did they teach you? Oh, that's right. So there were a series of experiments in the 1960s and 70s, where researchers tried to find out, and those have since shifted. We don't really do that anymore, but they were trying to find out if you could teach animals a human language. So they took a group of chimps from babyhood and taught them American Sign Language. And they just wanted to know, can a chimp not sort of just ape like a word, but can they can they use those words, you know, in situations and string them together. And that's what they found that they actually could.

And they can, not only that, but probably the most amazing thing I found out about the chimps is that they can make up words in American Sign Language for things they don't have a word for. Like what? Like, so like, Fanta would be like Coke, that is orange. No. Yeah. Amazing. Or Thanksgiving turkey, they called it, one of the chimps called it bird meat because they didn't have a word for turkey.

So they've since stopped doing that because the scientists, as they realize how complex and involved and emotional the chimps' inner worlds were, through this understanding of language, they decided to stop with those experiments. So those chimps are now retired in a sanctuary just outside of Montreal. And I went to meet them, saw this firsthand. They even sign to themselves when they're reading as if they're like talking out loud. Oh, very interesting. Yeah. It's amazing, yeah.

Let's talk about your piglets. This is at your farm in Nova Scotia. What did you learn from them? So these two little piglets, they're pet piglets. They came from the same litter of pigs. And so, again, you know, pigs are another animal that people sort of think of as not maybe having as much individuality as our dogs and cats, not having as much to say. They're very different personalities.

I spent quite a long time hanging out with them trying to kind of construct a pig shinery. Okay. of their sounds. So, you know, the little kind of grunts and squeaks and weeps and all the weird little noises that they make and what they meant. And I kind of came to the conclusion that pigs have pretty complicated inner lives too. So, yeah, they were really interesting to watch. Very nice. How are the pigs doing now?

They are doing great. Yeah, one's very bossy to her sister. They love lying in the sunshine. They love like paddling in the pool in the summer. They're fantastic animals. Okay. Let's change tunes a little bit. Let's go into the water because you did a visit to an aquarium in New England.

Talk to us about the octopus. What did you learn about them? So I went to visit a giant Pacific octopus whose name was Sedna. You know, we are hundreds of millions of years apart in terms of evolutionary history from an octopus. The last time we inhabited the same body was a flat worm, so that's a very long time ago. So I thought, you know, can we communicate or listen to an animal that, has nothing in common with this at all. And an octopus rescuer had told me, yes, you can.

If you lock eyes as an octopus, it's really profound. So I spent some time with Sedna and, yeah, found these things out, that I was clumsy and human and humans liked to touch. And so I sort of went in to touch her, and she was like, absolutely not. So it was really interesting that you can have this bond and this feeling of, like, deep communication without words, without any, we don't share the same limbs, we don't look the same, we don't experience the world the same.

And yet you can experience the world together in a moment. Quite beautiful. Let's talk about animal communicators that you had mentioned. What exactly do animal communicators do? So animal communicators, it's an interesting subject, a really big subject. And I knew nothing about it except for this idea of psychics. Right.

I imagine you're quite skeptical of them as well. Yes, I was. What I found out is that one of the animal communicators, has explained to me, is that you know how, like, if you enter a room or somebody comes in, let's say someone comes in from work, and before you've spoken to them, you kind of just have a feeling of whether they're in a good mood, bad mood. And we sometimes have that with our pets too, I think. We can tell without them doing anything that they need to go out or they're hungry. So they said it's like honing in on that, like really like working on that kind of sensory

perception. So it was really interesting. It was not something I'd ever experienced before. definitely a lot less skeptical now. You know, and I came to it with a journalistic sort of open mind, trying to be really open-minded about it. And, yeah, you know, I think there's some interesting crossovers with science, too. So I thought that was very interesting, that they're actually not at the far ends of the spectrum that I assumed they would be when I started the book.

Talk to us about why it's important for us to listen to animals and what we lose when we don't. And there was this line in your book that you say, you know, animals are biology, but they also have biography. And I think that will stick with me in terms of looking at individual animals as an individual. But what do we lose and what do we get? Yeah, so the naturalist Jonathan Balcom said that, that they don't just have biology, they also have biographies. Well, you know, we tend to often commodify animals in today's society.

With factory farming, we often don't really have a relationship to many animals except for our pets in our house. If you listen better to the natural world, there's a, there's a landscape ecologist called Bernie Krause who says you can hear extinction better often than you can see it. So listening to the natural world can give us clues as to the health of an environment ecosystem. Obviously, there are also at home. There are benefits for our pets and for us in listening. You know, our health goes up. You know, if we have good relationships with our pets, they also benefit too. And I think that listening better to the natural world

and to everything around us makes us, first of all, feel less disconnected. You know, we are part of nature. We're not this Descartian sort of Cartesian idea of us and them anymore. We are part, we're all us, and we're all in this together. So, you know, in terms of the environment, ecologically, benefits for farmed animals, listening benefits everybody. As we were talking right before this interview, I had mentioned, you know, I have a dog and I have a cat and lots of reviewers who are watching and listening right now have pets.

And they probably are trying to figure out how can they better communicate and better listen to their pets? Any words of advice? I think there's two things that you can do. And one is just noticing, like spending time with your pets, not asking them to do anything. You know, with our dogs, we're often telling them to do this or that. Just noticing the little things. Because often, like, a dog will look at something before it gives you a little. a more overt signal of what it wants.

So, you know, that's one thing is noticing. And I think also trying to see things from their kind of world view, their perspective, like dogs see, sort of see the world sent first. So if you can kind of try and put yourself in their paws a little bit, obviously we can't completely because we aren't a dog or a cat, but we can try and kind of come towards them a little bit more. For example, like with cats, cats like to, you know, do that kind of slow. blink to say that they trust you.

When my cat blinks, I know. I'm like, this is a beautiful moment we are sharing right now. Yes, right. So that's this lovely communication that's very, you know, that people in our busy lives and we're in a rush might not pause long enough just to notice these little things and these moments where your pet is actually sort of coming towards you and trying to tell you something that you might miss if you're in a hurry.

Amelia, this was fantastic. Thank you so much. I think this will inspire a number of pet owners and animal loving. to take a moment and pause and listen. Oh, well, thank you very much for having me. I'm Jay-Anne. Thanks for watching The Rundown. Do you have pets with strong opinions? How do they let you know?

Well, let us know. Send us an email at rundown at tvo.org, or you can always drop us a comment on our YouTube page. Until then, I will see you tomorrow. Coming up on the Rundown. Your work has, and I'll just go direct with this, it has changed my experience when I walked through it for. If you and I are going through a walk right now, where do we start? Where should we look?

Well, I think just be quiet with yourself and open yourself up to all of the dimensions that the forest is interacting with you. That includes the sounds, the wind, the smells, the crunch of the forest floor under your feet, the chattering of the squirrels, the river that might be flowing by, your own heart beat, then you become one with the forest. That's coming up on the rundown. If you're enjoying this series, please consider supporting TVO with a donation to make more insightful and thought-provoking podcast possible. TVO is a registered charity,

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