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Pretty much so, yes. The Arenavirus family has scores of viruses in it, several of which are known to infect and cause disease in people as well as animals.

While the family’s human pathogenic viruses are fairly closely related, they are divided into two groups—the Old World Arenaviruses and the New World Arenaviruses.

Prime Suspects

Among the Old World Arenaviruses, Lassa virus, Lujo virus and Lymphocytic Choriomeningitis virus are considered the most worthy of disease detectives’ attention, largely because of their ability to cause severe disease in people.

The prime suspects among the New World Arenaviruses are Junin virus, Machupo virus, Guanarito virus and Sabia virus.

Nicknames and Aliases

The family name of the Arenaviruses comes from the Latin arenosus, which means ‘sandy’. The name describes the sandy grain-like appearance of Arenavirus particles, or virions, under a microscope.

Lassa virus is named after the small town in Nigeria where it was first identified in 1969.

Junin virus, which takes the name of the city in Argentina where it first emerged in the early 1950s, also goes by the aliases Argentine Haemorrhagic Fever and Argentinian Mammarenavirus, while Machupo Virus is also known as Bolivian Haemorrhagic Fever, Black Typhus or Ordog Fever.

Sabia virus adopted the name of the neighbourhood of Jardim Sabia in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where it was first discovered in 1990. It is also known as Brazilian Haemorrhagic Fever.

Guanarito virus, named after the municipality in Venezuela where it was first detected and identified in 1989, is also sometimes referred to as Guanarito mammarenavirus or Venezuelan Haemorrhagic Fever.

Lujo virus’ name uses the first two letters of the names of the cities involved in the first known outbreak of the disease in 2008—in Lusaka in Zambia and Johannesburg in South Africa.

Lassa

Outbreaks of Lassa virus infection are becoming increasingly regular and increasingly large in West Africa. Outbreaks or sporadic cases have been found across the region, including in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Togo and Nigeria.

Estimates of the annual number of Lassa virus infections in West Africa range from 100,000 to 300,000. However, these are likely to be underestimates because surveillance for Lassa can be patchy, and confirmed and suspected cases are not always uniformly recorded.

In some areas of Sierra Leone and Liberia, studies have suggested that between 10 and 16 percent of people admitted to hospitals each year have Lassa fever.
 

Sabia virus

In the case of Sabia virus, to date there have only been a handful of documented human infections worldwide. The first naturally occurring human Sabia Virus case was in 1990, when a female agricultural engineer who was staying in the neighbourhood of Jardim Sabia in Sao Paulo contracted the disease and developed a fatal haemorrhagic fever. A virologist who was studying this first case of Sabia contracted the virus during his research, but survived. Four years later, a researcher in the United States was exposed to Sabia virus in a biohazard facility at Yale University when a centrifuge bottle cracked, leaked, and released aerosolised Sabia Virus particles. He was treated with an antiviral medication called Ribavirin and ultimately recovered from the infection.
 

Machupo virus

Machupo virus was first discovered in 1959 in an outbreak in San Joaquin in Bolivia. That outbreak lasted more than four years and infected almost 1,000 people, killing more than 250 of them. The deadly outbreak was only contained in 1964 when rat-control measures were brought in.

After a very quiet period between the 1970s and the early 1990s, in which there were no reported human cases of Machupo, the disease struck again in Bolivia in a small outbreak in 1994, infecting nine people and killing seven of them. Then, between 2000 and 2014, there were more than 300 Bolivian cases reported, with at least 22 deaths.
 

Guanarito virus

From September 1989 until December 2006, the Venezuelan state of Portuguesa recorded 618 cases of Guanarito virus infection in people. Almost all of those infected were people who were working or living in rural areas in the Municipality of Guanarito at the time they become sick. The case-fatality rate was more than 23 percent.