Vole fever is currently spreading across northern Europe, according to a recent analysis by Swedish researchers.
In France, cases are detected each year in patients exposed to this rodent, particularly “in the north-eastern quarter of the territory”, according to Public Health France.
What are the symptoms suggestive of this Ebola cousin virus and how is it transmitted?
Should we fear a spread of “vole fever”? This is the question raised by a study carried out by Swedish researchers on rodents carrying a pathogen that can cause this disease, also called “epidemic nephropathy”, with effects similar to Ebola and which can be transmitted to humans. As a guide, in the northern part of Sweden, between 100 and 450 cases of “vole fever” require hospitalization each year. In an attempt to analyze the spread of this virus, scientists from Uppsala University captured rodents in the southern region of Skåne, and found that 9 out of 74 carried genes belonging to the hantaviruses responsible for the ” vole fever.
“We were surprised to find that such a high proportion of the few voles we captured actually carried a hantavirus that makes people sick. And this happened in an area more than 500 km to the south of the area of known spread of the virus”, explains Elin Economou Lundeberg, doctor specializing in infectious diseases at Kristianstad Central Hospital, one of the authors of the study, published last April and recently reported on The Sun.
What are we talking about ?
Hantaviruses are “viruses present in certain rodents, the bank vole and incidentally the collared field mouse, living in forests and sometimes in neighboring buildings”, we can read on the website of the Ministry of Health. To date, four different types of hantaviruses responsible for transmitting disease to humans have been identified, including Puumala virus, “responsible for the greatest number of cases of hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, or vole fever”, explains the National Reference Center for Hantaviruses at the Pasteur Institute.
Hantaviruses can be transmitted to humans by “inhaling airborne droplets of saliva or urine, or feces dust from infected wild rodents”, details the Ministry of Health. In rarer cases, transmission can occur during direct contact between contaminated material and damaged skin or by ingestion of contaminated food or water. The contaminations observed in humans are characterized by “an infection that is most often benign but which can, in certain cases, cause clinical signs serious enough to lead to hospitalization”, describes the Lille branch of the Pasteur Institute. Infected patients complain of fever, chills, headaches or even muscle and abdominal pain.
What about its presence in France?
To date, the Puumala virus “circulates in Northern and Western Europe”, underlines the Pasteur Institute, citing a fortunately low fatality rate, of around 0.4%. Note that to date, no cases of human-to-human transmission have been reported in Europe.
The bank vole, the main reservoir of the virus, is “present everywhere in the metropolitan territory, except on the Mediterranean coast, but cases due to the Puumala virus are detected in patients exposed to this rodent in the north-eastern quarter of the territory”, reports Public Health France, specifying that the virus “may be the cause of localized epidemics”.
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