French Health Minister Stéphanie Rist confirmed on Monday that a woman evacuated from the MV Hondius cruise ship over the weekend has tested positive for hantavirus. The patient, who was part of the ongoing evacuation operation, is now receiving medical care in France.
Meanwhile, the Spanish Ministry of Health announced that two suspected cases identified by the Spanish government have tested negative. The MV Hondius docked at the port of Granadilla de Abona in Tenerife on Sunday, where passengers were transferred to their home countries for medical tests and isolation.
The United States reported on Monday that one passenger is experiencing mild symptoms and another tested mildly positive for the Andes virus via PCR. Javier Padilla, Spain's Secretary of State for Health, clarified that the American passenger had an indeterminate PCR result on board, which the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and Spanish epidemiologists considered negative. The US, however, is treating it as mildly positive. Padilla noted that the other symptomatic passenger's symptoms were deemed inconsistent with hantavirus by Spain and the ECDC, but the US is taking precautions.
Two planes are scheduled to leave Spain on Monday afternoon, one bound for Australia and the other for the Netherlands, carrying the remaining passengers from the ship. The World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed six cases of hantavirus linked to the outbreak and warned that more could emerge due to the virus's incubation period of up to six weeks.
WHO Distinguishes Outbreak from COVID-19
During a press conference, WHO infectious disease epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove sought to calm fears by distinguishing the hantavirus outbreak from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. “This is not SARS-CoV-2. This is not the start of a COVID pandemic. This is an outbreak that we see on a ship,” she said. Van Kerkhove explained that hantavirus spreads through close, intimate contact, not through airborne transmission like coronaviruses.
The outbreak on the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius has resulted in three deaths and nine illnesses. The ship remains off the coast of Cape Verde with nearly 150 people on board. Dutch officials are coordinating with the ship's owner and affected countries. The US has agreed to send a plane to the Canary Islands to repatriate its 17 citizens, and the UK will charter a flight for its nearly two dozen citizens.
The ship departed Argentina on 1 April for an Atlantic cruise that was to include stops in Antarctica and the Falkland Islands, but the itinerary changed due to the outbreak. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that three patients with suspected hantavirus have been evacuated to the Netherlands, adding that “at this stage, the overall public health risk remains low.”
Authorities are investigating possible human-to-human transmission, which is considered extremely rare. They believe the first infected person likely contracted the virus before boarding. No rats have been found on the ship. A case linked to the vessel has also been confirmed in Switzerland, and health authorities in South Africa and Switzerland have identified a strain capable of rare human-to-human spread.
Health authorities across four continents are tracking passengers who disembarked before the outbreak was detected. On April 24, more than two dozen people from at least 12 countries left the ship without contact tracing. The WHO confirmed that a KLM flight attendant who worked a Johannesburg-to-Amsterdam flight on April 25 and later fell ill tested negative for hantavirus. The flight attendant was hospitalized in Amsterdam. The infected passenger on that flight, a Dutch woman whose husband died on the ship, was too ill to travel and died in Johannesburg.
UK health authorities reported a third suspected British case on Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory in the South Atlantic where the ship stopped in April. Two other Britons have confirmed infections, one hospitalized in the Netherlands and another in South Africa. Around 40 passengers disembarked after the first death on board, including the wife of the deceased, during a stop at St. Helena.
For more on the response in the remote island territory, see our report on UK Military Air-Drops Medics to Tristan da Cunha Over Hantavirus Scare. The situation in Tenerife, where residents have remained calm, is covered in Tenerife Residents Calm as Hantavirus-Linked Cruise Ship Docks. The EU's coordination efforts are detailed in EU Coordinates Response to Hantavirus Outbreak on Cruise Ship, Says Public Risk Low.
