Health officials are now monitoring American passengers from the cruise ship MV Hondius for hantavirus after they returned home. The fact that the virus on board is a unique strain that can spread from person to person is one of the primary concerns for health officials.
The passengers who have returned home are residents of Georgia, California, Virginia, Arizona, and Texas. They left the Dutch cruise ship prior to the confirmation of the hantavirus outbreak, which has killed three people and sickened at least seven more.
At a press conference on Thursday, the World Health Organization announced that at least 12 countries are currently monitoring individuals who disembarked from the MV Hondius before the hantavirus cases were confirmed. They include Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
On April 27, authorities evacuated a British man who had symptoms on board to South Africa for medical treatment. According to the cruise ship company, Oceanwide Expeditions, his case was the first to be identified as hantavirus on May 4.
In an interview with Sky News this week, the man, a 56-year-old ex-police officer, said he was “doing okay.”
“There are still lots of tests to be done. I have no idea how long I’ll be in the hospital for. I’m in isolation at the moment,” he added.
Is the hantavirus outbreak the start of a new pandemic?
Concerns over the deadly outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship have led Argentina’s health ministry to announce that it will start testing rodents for hantavirus. Just days before they boarded the cruise ship, a now-deceased Dutch couple visited a landfill during a bird-watching tour in the city of Ushuaia and contracted a rare strain of hantavirus from rodents, according to local officials.
“Prior to boarding the ship, the first two cases had traveled through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay on a bird-watching trip, which included visits to sites where the species of rat that is known to carry Andes virus was present,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during Thursday’s press conference.
Maria van Kerkhove, an infectious disease epidemiologist with the World Health Organization, also stated that the hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship is not the start of a new pandemic because “it spreads very, very differently.”