Hemorrhagic Fever with Renal Syndrome

In February 1982, on a meeting of the Working Group on Hemorrhagic Fever with Renal Syndrome, it was decided that infections characterized by fever, hemorrhage, and renal involvement should in the future be referred to as “hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome” (HFRS) (Anon 1983). HFRS is prevalent in large parts of Europe and Asia. The viruses that cause the earlier described conditions belong to the genus Hantavirus, a member of the family Bunyaviridae (Plyusnin et al. 1996; Vapalahti et al. 2003). Rodents and insectivores act as carriers [for the current taxonomy see, Wilson and Reed (2005)]. In rodents, hantaviruses are found in the Cricetidae family (subfamilies Arvicolinae, Neotominae, and Sigmodontinae) and in the Muridae family (Henttonen et al. 2008). Each hantavirus type is-as a rule-carried by a specic rodent host species. Recently, new hantaviruses have been discovered in the Soricidae and Talpidae families (subfamilies Crociduridae and Scalopinae respectively) in which the very rst hantavirus, Thottapalayam virus (TPMV), (Carey et al. 1971) was discovered in Suncus murinus, the Asian House shrew (family Soricidae, subfamily Crociduridae) as such preceding Hantaan virus (HTNV) (Lee et al. 1978). In nature, their zoonotic cycle is maintained by transmission from rodent to rodent (and probably from insectivore to insectivore) via aerosolized contaminated excreta (Olsson et al. 2010).