How We Research & Review

Who Writes This Site

All content on HantavirusQuestions.com is researched and written by Andy Wilcox, founder of the Virus Questions network. Andy is an independent researcher — not a physician, virologist, or epidemiologist.

His background is in analytical research: applying rigorous primary-source methodology to complex bodies of evidence. He holds an MBA and professional credentials (CPA, PMP), and has spent 30+ years as a consultant, operating executive, and investor. He brings that same analytical discipline to public health information — working directly from CDC, WHO, NIH, and peer-reviewed sources rather than from secondary summaries or news articles.

This site has no medical reviewer. No licensed clinician reviews content before or after publication. The content represents Andy Wilcox's independent research and synthesis of authoritative primary sources — not medical opinion. For personal medical concerns, consult a qualified healthcare provider.

Primary Sources We Use

Every factual claim on clinical pages is sourced to one of the following. We do not cite news articles or other websites as primary evidence for clinical claims.

• CDC — U.S. primary authority for hantavirus surveillance, case definitions, and clinical guidance
• WHO / PAHO — global epidemiological data, outbreak reports, and international public health guidance
• NIH / PubMed — biomedical research database and peer-reviewed literature
• State health departments — outbreak and surveillance data for U.S. cases
• Peer-reviewed journals — Journal of Infectious Diseases, Emerging Infectious Diseases (CDC), NEJM, The Lancet, Science, and others indexed in PubMed

We apply a hierarchy of evidence consistent with evidence-based medicine: systematic reviews and RCTs first, followed by CDC/WHO guidance, then observational data. When sources disagree, we note the disagreement rather than picking a side.

Where scientific or historical consensus is well established, content reflects that consensus. Where evidence is uncertain or evolving — such as antiviral research or novel strains — that uncertainty is stated explicitly rather than implied or omitted.

Fact-Checking Process

Every factual claim on a clinical page goes through the following steps before publication:

1. Source identification — The specific CDC page, WHO document, or peer-reviewed study that supports the claim is located and linked.
2. Claim verification — The claim is compared directly to the source text. Paraphrasing is checked to confirm accuracy of meaning, not just surface transcription.
3. Cross-reference check — Where possible, significant clinical claims are cross-referenced against at least two independent authoritative sources.
4. Uncertainty flagging — Any claim that is provisional, contested, or based on limited data is marked as such in the published text.

We cite specific studies and primary sources so readers can verify every claim independently. Where a claim is linked, the link goes to the underlying primary document — not to an article that reported on it.

Three Worked Examples from the September 2026 Review

Method claims are cheap. Here is what the September 2026 review of this site actually did, so the process above can be checked against its output.

1. We went to the data file instead of the page

CDC's public "Reported Cases of Hantavirus Disease" page gives a cumulative total for 1993–2023 and stops there. Two CDC data services do not stop: the weekly NNDSS tables on data.cdc.gov, which carry provisional state-level counts through week 35 of 2026, and the patient-level file behind the map on CDC's own page, which records onset month, state and outcome for all 890 cases. Reading both gave this site figures that CDC's consumer pages do not state anywhere — including the case-fatality rate by state and the fact that year-end provisional counts are routinely revised upward by a third or more. Those appear on the outbreaks page, each labelled as our tabulation of CDC's file.

2. We removed numbers we could not source

The previous version of the transmission page carried a table of how long hantavirus survives in different environments — days to weeks indoors, hours in sunlight, minutes after bleach. Those figures were plausible and unsourced. Searching the literature found measurements for Puumala and Hantaan viruses under stated laboratory conditions, and nothing at all for Sin Nombre virus, the strain behind nearly every U.S. case. The table was replaced with what has actually been measured, and the page now says outright that the number people are looking for does not exist. Three other unsourced figures were removed the same way this month: approximate country case ranges for the Americas, an El Niño finding attributed to the wrong journal, and a respirator recommendation attributed to OSHA that we could not locate in an OSHA document.

3. We narrowed a claim the whole site was making

Several pages here said there is no approved hantavirus vaccine "anywhere in the world." That is wrong: inactivated vaccines against Hantaan and Seoul virus are licensed for human use in the Republic of Korea and in China. What is true — and is what a reader in the U.S. actually needs — is that no hantavirus vaccine is licensed in the United States or Europe, and none exists for the viruses that cause disease in the Americas. Every instance was narrowed to that, including the instruction block in this site's own automated monthly-review script, which had been asserting the wrong version to the reviewing model.

What we refuse to compute

This site does not publish a derived number when the inputs do not support it. There is no aggregate U.S. economic-burden figure for hantavirus here, because producing one would mean multiplying a wide per-case cost range by a small and provisional case count and presenting the product as knowledge — the economic page explains at length why that would be worse than a blank. For the same reason this site does not state a survival time for hantavirus on household surfaces, does not convert CDC's cumulative case total into an annual rate, and does not average CDC's and PAHO's conflicting U.S. figures for 2025 — it shows both and says which is the surveillance system of record.

Monthly Content Review Process

Core content pages (Symptoms, Transmission, Prevention, Treatment, Outbreaks) are reviewed at least monthly against current CDC and WHO guidance. The review process:

1. Current CDC and WHO source documents are fetched on the first of each month.
2. An AI-assisted review compares existing page claims against those authoritative sources.
3. Only claims that are directly contradicted by current authority guidance are flagged — the review does not rewrite or expand content speculatively.
4. Corrections are applied to the affected pages and committed to the site.
5. The "Last reviewed" date on each clinical page is updated to reflect the most recent review cycle, even if no content changes were needed.

This means clinical pages are never more than ~6 weeks out of date with CDC/WHO guidance. When CDC or WHO updates its hantavirus guidance, affected pages are updated within 30 days. The review is logged in our GitHub repository, so the change history is public and auditable.

The automated review is deliberately constrained. Its prompt carries a block of stable facts it must not "correct" away, and a copy of every published correction on this site, so that a previously fixed error cannot be reintroduced by a model working from general knowledge. That constraint is also enforced mechanically: a continuous-integration check reads the corrections log and refuses any change that re-adds a corrected phrase or deletes a corrected one. The mechanism exists because an automated review on a sister site in this network once tried to revert a published correction.

The site's news section is updated daily via automated aggregation of major public health and scientific news sources.

Use of AI Tools

This site uses AI language model tools (including Claude by Anthropic) to assist with research, drafting, and editing. All AI-assisted content is reviewed, edited, and approved by the author before publication. AI tools are used to help organize information and improve clarity — not to generate factual claims independently. Every factual claim is verified against primary sources by the author.

Independence and Funding

HantavirusQuestions.com is independently operated. It has no financial relationship with any pharmaceutical company, public health agency, or healthcare institution. Editorial content is not influenced by any organization with a financial interest in the subject matter.

As of September 2026 this site earns nothing. It has two registered revenue mechanisms, and both are switched off:

• Google AdSense — the site remains registered, but no advertising is displayed on any page. If ads are re-enabled, this page and the About page will say so on the day it changes.
• Amazon Associates — the site remains enrolled, but no affiliate link appears on any indexable page. When affiliate content was live it appeared only on prevention-kit and equipment pages, never on clinical pages, and was disclosed wherever it appeared.

Neither mechanism, when active, influences which topics are covered, how they are presented, or what the factual content says.

What This Site Is Not

• Not medical advice. Nothing here should be used to make personal health decisions. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider.
• Not affiliated with CDC or WHO. We cite these agencies as primary sources; we are not affiliated with or endorsed by them.
• Not a news publication. The daily news feed aggregates headlines from authoritative sources for awareness — it is not editorial coverage or original journalism.
• Not a peer-reviewed resource. We synthesize peer-reviewed research for a general audience; the synthesis itself has not been peer-reviewed.

Medical Disclaimer

The information on HantavirusQuestions.com is for general informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended as, and does not constitute, medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the guidance of a qualified healthcare provider for any medical concerns. In an emergency, call 911.

Corrections

Errors are corrected promptly — typically within 48 hours of identification. Readers and clinicians can submit corrections at any time via our corrections page or the contact page. Confirmed corrections are applied promptly and the change is noted on the affected page — each correction is stated inline where it happened, not only in the log. Several corrections on this site are machine-guarded: a continuous-integration check refuses any future edit that reintroduces the corrected wording. See the author page for Andy Wilcox's full background.