The Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases were designed to study viruses that could jump from animals to people, including hantavirus, but in 2025 the National Institutes of Health said the work wouldn’t continue

By Adam Kovac edited by Claire Cameron

In 2025 the Trump administration eliminated funding for a pilot project aimed at studying the type of hantavirus that has been confirmed to be behind an ongoing outbreak on a cruise ship that is now believed to have caused the deaths of three people and sickened several more. The virus has potentially spread beyond the ship because there were passengers who disembarked during the voyage before the first suspected case came to light; three U.S. states are now monitoring for the pathogen.

The pilot project was designed to better understand how hantavirus passes from rodents to humans and was being conducted through the West African Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases (WAC-EID), one of 10 centers that comprised the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) network. All 10 centers were shuttered last year after the National Institutes of Health decided the research was “unsafe.”

The WAC-EID primarily studied diseases in Senegal, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, and many of these illnesses were borne by rodents. “We found out that there was a group in Argentina that wanted to do similar kinds of things that we were doing in West Africa,” says Scott Weaver, WAC-EID’s former leader and a professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch. “We supported them to put in an application for a pilot award, and they did that, and they were reviewed, and they were successful in getting funded.”

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Most recorded hantavirus cases are contracted through direct exposure to rodents and their feces and urine—not through human-to-human transmission. The exception is a pathogen in this family of viruses called the Andes virus—for which several people who were onboard the MV Hondius have tested positive. But experts know little about the mechanisms of human-to-human transmission, in part because of how rare such outbreaks are. It’s possible that hantavirus can be passed on through direct exposure to an infected person’s saliva—such as by kissing—but it’s unclear if the pathogen can be transmitted through aerosol droplets of saliva, such as those produced by sneezing or coughing. Learning more about the virus, infection with which can result in a buildup of fluid in the lungs, hemorrhagic fever and kidney failure, was the goal of the canceled pilot project.

From 2021 WAC-EID was awarded a series of U.S. governmental grants, ranging between $521,027 and $1,702,711. Of that, Weaver says around $100,000 would likely have been dedicated to the Argentina study.

According to records compiled by Grant Witness—a website dedicated to tracking eliminated federal agency grants, including from the NIH—of the more than $8.3 million that the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) originally outlaid for WAC-EID, almost $2.4 million had yet to be dispersed at the time that the funding was cut. Virologists working with CREID decried the move at the time, saying there was no evidence their work was unsafe—the cuts came amid a broader pullback of federal infectious disease funding and surveillance. The Department of Health and Human Services, which overseas the NIH and NIAID, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In its final funding filing to the NIH, dated to 2024, WAC-EID boasted numerous accomplishments, such as research that had led to faster, more accurate outbreak detection in West Africa for several pathogens, including a variety of dengue fever.

“The continuation of the CREID program will help to further reduce response times to emerging infectious disease threats, improve pathogen discovery pipelines, and enhance regional capacity for data-driven public health interventions,” the researchers wrote at the time.

The Argentina project almost certainly would not have prevented the outbreak onboard the Hondius. Weaver stresses, however, that funding cuts to this kind of research can make the U.S. and the world more vulnerable to viral pandemics. He points to the Zika virus outbreak of 2015 and 2016, during which thousands of Americans were exposed to a previously obscure pathogen.

“We’re not in a good position to say [hantavirus], just because it’s never caused big outbreaks, doesn’t have the potential to do that one day,” he says.

While the Hondius is currently isolated at sea, and all the asymptomatic passengers remain onboard, several people are known to have disembarked before the outbreak began, including individuals from at least three U.S. states—California, Arizona and Georgia. The California Department of Public Health said in a statement that it is coordinating with local health officials to monitor a number of residents, although there is no indication any are infected. Two Georgia residents are also being monitored after leaving the ship, according to the state’s public health department, which added in a statement that both are “in good health and show no signs of infection.”

At a press conference on Thursday, World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said eight total cases have been reported, with five of those eight confirmed to be hantavirus. While classifying the incident as “serious,” he stressed that the public health risk is low, as the Andes hantavirus does not appear to pass between humans easily.

Editor's note: This is a developing story and may be updated.