An independent ledger of a neglected zoonosis.
Hantometer was started for one reason. When the Atlantic cruise outbreak made the front pages in May 2026, anyone wanting reliable country-by-country numbers on hantavirus had to splice them together from twelve different government sites. We thought one ledger would be useful.
The hantavirus family of rodent-borne viruses kills somewhere between several hundred and several thousand people a year. The exact figure is unknown — a remarkable thing to say about a notifiable infection in 2026. National surveillance varies in cadence (daily in some Asian provinces, quarterly in much of Europe, ad hoc elsewhere). Aggregators like Our World in Data and Johns Hopkins poured enormous effort into COVID, but no one has built the equivalent for the smaller, longer-running outbreaks of HFRS and HPS.
This project tries to fill the gap. We pull from WHO Disease Outbreak News, CDC weekly reports, ECDC AER PDFs, PAHO regional surveillance and roughly twenty national health-ministry feeds. We normalise to a single schema and refresh every 30 minutes for news + outbreak alerts and daily for surveillance.
What we publish
- A global tracker with cumulative cases, deaths and case-fatality ratio.
- Country dispatches — one per reporting nation — with strain-level epidemiology, exposure patterns and recent outbreak timelines.
- A weekly editorial newsletter, free, no advertising.
- Open JSON API endpoints, refreshed every 30 minutes for news + outbreak alerts and daily at 06:00 UTC for surveillance.
- An optional API for researchers and newsrooms.
Editorial standards
Three rules. First, every number on this site links back to a primary source — a WHO bulletin, a ministry press release, a peer-reviewed study. If we cannot trace it, we do not publish it. Second, we mark provisional figures clearly and do not retroactively quietly revise them; we keep a public changelog. Third, no advertising and no commercial partnerships in the editorial product.
Funding
The project is currently self-funded. If it proves useful, we plan to fund it through a research-grade API tier and through grants from public-health philanthropies. The free dashboard, the country pages and the weekly dispatch will always remain free.
Get in touch
Editorial: [email protected]
Data corrections: [email protected]
Press and partnerships: [email protected]