High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Hantaviruses are negative sense RNA viruses in the Bunyaviridae family. Humans may be infected with hantaviruses through rodent bites, urine, saliva or contact with rodent waste products. Some hantaviruses cause potentially fatal diseases in humans, hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) and hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS), but others have not been associated with human disease. Human infections of hantaviruses have almost entirely been linked to human contact with rodent excrement, but recent human-to-human transmission has been reported with the Andes virus in South America. The name hantavirus is derived from the Hantan River area in South Korea, which provided the founding member of the group: Hantaan virus (HTNV), isolated in the late 1970s by Ho-Wang Lee and colleagues. HTNV is one of several hantaviruses that cause HFRS, formerly known as Korean hemorrhagic fever.