Fever with renal syndrome, hemorrhagic

A set of diseases, also known as hemorrhagic fever, characterized by the abrupt onset of high fever and chills, headache, cold and cough, and pain in the muscles, joints and abdomen with nausea and vomiting followed by bleeding into the kidney and elsewhere. Many forms of certain viruses (arboviruses, including those in the families Togaviridae, Flaviviridae, Filoviridae, and Bunyaviridae and the Hantaviruses, spread by rodents or biting insects), can cause this disorder, as can the Ebola virus. Bioterrorism -- There has been concern about the hemorrhagic fever as a possible weapon for bioterrorism. However, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of the US Congress, in a 1999 report considered hemorrhagic fever to be an "unlikely" biologic threat for terrorism, because these viruses are very difficult to obtain and process, unsafe to handle, and relatively unstable. The lethal effects of these viruses were deemed by the GAO to depend on the strain but can be "very high."