90-Second Read: How to Manage Your Health Anxiety About Hantavirus

A Hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship is triggering COVID flashbacks. Scroll through any newsfeed right now, and you'll see news of a cruise ship with a cluster of fatal Hantavirus cases, and a collective freak-out unfolding in real time. It's too soon to know exactly how the outbreak will play out (though health experts insist that Hantavirus is not COVID, and the risk to the general public is low). Howard Markel, a medical historian and author of books including When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America Since 1900 and the Fears They Have Unleashed, has spent his career studying how societies respond to health threats.

Read More : The Difference Between Stress and Anxiety Six years on, Markel sees a population that hasn't forgotten, that's still washing its hands more, still masking in some settings, and still recoiling at headlines about viruses (then feverishly clicking them). Karen Cassiday, a clinical psychologist and author of Freedom from Health Anxiety, says the word itself does some of the damage. The more vivid stories about Hantavirus you consume, the more common and imminent the threat feels, regardless of what the actual numbers say. Reid Wilson, director of the Anxiety Disorders Treatment Center in Chapel Hill, N.C., says collective trauma changes how the brain processes future threats.

He used to tell anyone who asked that the final act of any pandemic is what he calls "global amnesia", the moment when people dust themselves off, go on their merry way, and largely forget all about it. Navarro points out that Hantavirus normally generates almost no news coverage at all. When people hear "Hantavirus," she says, their memory pulls up haunting associations of catastrophic illness and death. Hantavirus typically spreads through contact with rats and mice, or, more precisely, with their droppings, urine, and saliva.

If any of this sounds familiar, the good news is that concrete techniques can help you keep your anxiety in check. Here's what experts recommend: Cassiday calls compulsive news-reading a form of reassurance-seeking, and the worst possible response to anxiety. Read More : How to Manage Catastrophic Thinking Doomscrolling makes this dramatically worse.