A 44-year-old woman in central Germany nearly died from a virus most people have never heard of, transmitted by creatures increasingly found in living rooms across the country: pet rats. The culprit was Seoul virus, a member of the hantavirus family that lurks in rat urine, feces, and saliva. After visiting a private rat breeding facility in early 2024, the woman developed fever, extreme fatigue, and diarrhea. Within days, her kidneys failed, requiring emergency dialysis. She survived, but the case has infectious disease experts worried about a blind spot in public health: the booming popularity of rats as household pets.
The woman had no underlying health conditions. Five weeks before her symptoms began, she visited a breeder to pick up pet rats for her children. She felt fine at first, but the virus was already incubating. By March, she was in the hospital with acute kidney injury so severe that her serum creatinine levels spiked to more than ten times the normal range. Doctors performed a kidney biopsy and found hantavirus antigens lodged in her tubular cells, surrounded by bleeding, swelling, and inflammation. It was a textbook case of hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, minus the hemorrhagic fever.