Sweating sickness, also known as English sweating sickness or English sweate (Latin: sudor anglicus), was a mysterious and highly contagious disease that struck England, and later continental Europe, in a series of epidemics beginning in 1485.oting symptom overlap with hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, several scientists proposed an unknown hantavirus as the cause. A critique of this hypothesis included the argument that, whereas sweating sickness was thought to be transmitted from human to human, hantaviruses are not known to spread in this way.