Were the English Sweating Sickness and the Picardy Sweat Caused by Hantaviruses?

Viruses via National Library of Medicine ^ | January 2014 | Paul Heyman, Leopold Simons, and Christel Cochez

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Abstract: The English sweating sickness caused five devastating epidemics between 1485 and 1551, England was hit hardest, but on one occasion also mainland Europe, with mortality rates between 30% and 50%. The Picardy sweat emerged about 150 years after the English sweat disappeared, in 1718, in France. It caused 196 localized outbreaks and apparently in its turn disappeared in 1861. Both diseases have been the subject of numerous attempts to define their origin, but so far all efforts were in vain. Although both diseases occurred in different time frames and were geographically not overlapping, a common denominator could be what we know today as hantavirus infections. This review aims to shed light on the characteristics of both diseases from contemporary as well as current knowledge and suggests hantavirus infection as the most likely cause for the English sweating sickness as well as for the Picardy sweat...

The earliest description of hantavirus infection dates back to China, around the year 900 AD. Hantavirus disease was suggested as a possible cause for the 1862–1863 “war nephritis” epidemic during the American Civil War, during which around 14,000 individuals developed a hantavirus disease-like condition [4,5]. An epidemic of trench nephritis during World War I may also have been caused by hantavirus infection [6,7,8]. In his attempts to identify the cause of the disease, Rutherford linked trench fever to voles, to the Sweating Sickness in England and to the Picardy Sweat in France...

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It worked out better for me this way. :^)