Hantavirus outbreak latest: France confirms new case in a woman evacuated from the ship

A woman who left the ship this weekend as part of the evacuation operation has been confirmed as a new hantavirus case, French Health Minister Stéphanie Rist told national media. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT The two suspected cases identified by the Spanish government have tested negative, the Spanish Ministry of Health has confirmed. The MV Hondius reached the Spanish coastal port of Granadilla de Abona in Tenerife on Sunday. From there, the passengers were transferred to their respective home countries, where they will undergo medical tests and follow an isolation period. The United States announced on Monday, following the evacuation from the ship, that one passenger is currently experiencing mild symptoms and another passenger tested mildly PCR positive for the Andes virus. Javier Padilla, Secretary of State for Health of the Government of Spain, has said that it is important to provide further context around these cases and the information shared by the United States government. In a TV appearance on Monday, Padilla explained that the American passenger had had an indeterminate result on a PCR test conducted on board. The ECDC and Spanish epidemiologists considered it a negative, while the United States is working with "mildly positive". The situation is similar to the other symptomatic passenger, Padilla said. While Spain and the ECDC considered the symptoms to be inconsistent with hantavirus, the United States is treating it as such for now. Two aeroplanes are expected to leave Spain on Monday afternoon, one heading to Australia and the other to the Netherlands, transferring the last passengers left on the ship. Six cases of hantavirus linked to the cruise outbreak have now been confirmed by the World Health Organization (WHO), which warned that more infections could still emerge because the virus can have an incubation period of up to six weeks. During a press conference, WHO infectious disease epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove sought to distinguish the outbreak from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. "I want to be unequivocal here. 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 does not spread in the same way as coronaviruses, but rather through "close, intimate contact". What happened on the MV Hondius? Three passengers have died, and nine others have been sickened by hantavirus on board the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius cruise ship, which remains marooned off the coast of Cape Verde with nearly 150 people onboard. Dutch officials said on Friday they were also in close contact with the ship's owner and the authorities of countries whose citizens are on board. The United States has agreed to send a plane to the Canary Islands to repatriate its 17 citizens from the cruise ship, she said. The British government also said it will charter a plane to evacuate the nearly two dozen British citizens on board. The ship left Argentina on 1 April on an Atlantic cruise and was scheduled to include stops in Antarctica, the Falkland Islands, and other locations, though its itinerary has since changed due to the outbreak. The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said three patients with suspected hantavirus cases have been evacuated and are on their way to the Netherlands. “At this stage, the overall public health risk remains low,” he wrote on his X account. Meanwhile, Maria Van Kerkhove of the WHO said officials are investigating possible human-to-human transmission - something considered extremely rare - and believe the first infected person likely contracted the virus before boarding. Authorities have also said there are no rats on board. A case linked to the ship has also been confirmed in Switzerland, while health authorities in South Africa and Switzerland have identified a strain capable of spreading between humans in rare cases. Countries scramble to track passengers who disembarked Health authorities across four continents continue to track down and monitor passengers who disembarked the ship before the deadly outbreak was detected, and are trying to trace others who may have come into contact with them since then. On April 24, nearly two weeks after the first passenger had died on board, more than two dozen people from at least 12 different countries left the ship without contact tracing, the ship’s operator and Dutch officials said Thursday. The World Health Organization confirmed on Friday that a flight attendant on a plane briefly boarded by an infected cruise passenger in South Africa had tested negative for hantavirus. The KLM flight attendant was working on a Johannesburg to Amsterdam flight on April 25 and had later fallen ill. She was taken to an isolation ward at an Amsterdam hospital on Thursday. The cruise passenger, a Dutch woman whose husband died on the ship, was too ill to take the international flight to Europe and was taken off the plane in Johannesburg, where she died. The Dutch public health service is currently undertaking contract tracing on passengers from the flight who had contact with the ill woman before she left the plane. On Friday, UK health authorities said a third British national is suspected of having the hantavirus. The UK Health Security Agency said the suspected case is on Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory in the South Atlantic, where the ship stopped in April. There was no word on their condition. Two other Britons who were on the ship have been confirmed to have the virus. One is hospitalised in the Netherlands and the other in South Africa Passengers disembarked after first onboard death Around 40 passengers disembarked from the cruise ship after the first passenger died on board, Dutch officials say. The passengers left the MV Hondius during a stop at the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena, according to the Dutch foreign ministry. Among them was the wife of a 70-year-old Dutch passenger who died onboard after falling ill during the voyage. She later flew on a commercial flight to South Africa, where she collapsed and died in the hospital. The cruise operator, Oceanwide Expeditions, had previously only confirmed that the Dutch woman left the ship with her husband’s body and had not publicly acknowledged that dozens of other passengers also disembarked. Dutch authorities did not say where the passengers who left the ship are now. What is hantavirus? Hantavirus refers to a group of viruses carried by rodents, primarily transmitted to humans through inhalation of airborne particles from dried rodent droppings. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hantaviruses can cause two serious illnesses. The first is hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which affects the lungs and can lead to severe respiratory failure. The second is haemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, which affects the kidneys and can cause serious complications.