Health Officials Track Dozens Who Left Hantavirus-Stricken Ship After First Fatality

MADRID (AP) — On Thursday, health authorities on four continents were tracking and monitoring passengers as they got off planes. Cruise ship infected with hantavirus is trying to trace others who may have come into contact with them before and since the deadly outbreak was detected.

An investigative team in Argentina has not yet set out for the southern town they suspect. epidemic Officials with the country’s Health Ministry told The Associated Press on Thursday that the incident occurred. Argentinian researchers suspect a Dutch couple may have contracted virus while on a birding trip before boarding the cruise ship.

More than two dozen people from at least 12 different countries left the ship without contact tracing on April 24, nearly two weeks after the first passenger died on the ship, the ship’s operator and Dutch officials said Thursday.

three passengers died A Dutch couple and a German citizen and several other people are sick during the outbreak. Symptoms usually appear one to eight weeks after exposure.

Netherlands-based Oceanwide Expeditions cruise ship company said Thursday that none of the passengers or crew remaining on the ship are currently showing symptoms.

The World Health Organization says the risk to the general public is low. Hantavirus is usually spread through inhalation of contaminated rodent feces and is not easily transmitted between humans.

On Thursday, WHO’s director of alerting and response, Dr. “We believe that if public health measures are implemented and solidarity is shown in all countries, this will be a limited epidemic,” Abdirahman Mahamud said.

Three people, including the ship’s doctor, were evacuated on Wednesday while the ship was near the West African island nation of Cape Verde and taken to private hospitals in Europe for treatment.

The body of the Dutch man, who was the first person to die on the ship on April 11, was taken to the remote island of St. Petersburg in the South Atlantic after his wife got off the ship on April 24. Helena was also removed from the ship. He then flew to South Africa and died there a day later.

A total of 30 passengers, including the dead Dutch man and his wife, were in St. Petersburg, the ship’s operator said on Thursday. He said he left the ship in Helena. The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs put this figure at approximately 40. The company had not previously publicly disclosed that dozens more people left the ship on April 24.

Health officials first confirmed hantavirus in a passenger on the ship on May 2. WHO he says. This is St. It was with a British man who was evacuated from the ship to South Africa three days after the Helena stop. He was tested in South Africa and is in intensive care there.

On Wednesday, St. It was revealed that a man in Switzerland tested positive for hantavirus after landing in St. Helena, but the exact movements in between are unclear.

On Thursday, Singaporean health officials in St. He said they followed two men who got off the ship in St. Helena, flew to South Africa and then home. The two men, who arrived in Singapore at different times, were isolated and tested, officials said.

Passengers disembarked at St. Petersburg, a volcanic British site in the South Atlantic. Officials in Helena said they are monitoring a small number of people considered “high-risk contacts.” St. The Helena government said high-risk contacts were told to isolate for 45 days.

A flight attendant on a plane briefly boarded by an infected passenger in South Africa showed symptoms of hantavirus and will be tested in the isolation ward of a hospital in Amsterdam, the Dutch health ministry said on Thursday. A Dutch female cruise passenger whose husband died on the ship was too ill to board an international flight to Europe and was taken off the plane in Johannesburg where she died.

If the Dutch flight attendant tests positive, she could be the first person not aboard the MV Hondius known to be infected in the outbreak.

The ship is currently heading to Spain’s Canary Islands, where it is expected to arrive Saturday or Sunday with more than 140 passengers and crew still on board.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Thursday that he was in regular contact with the ship’s captain and his morale improved when the ship started moving again.

Authorities in South Africa are also trying to trace the contacts of passengers who had previously disembarked. Essentially, it arrived in St. Petersburg on April 25, the day after the passengers landed there. They focused on the flight from Helena to Johannesburg.

A French citizen with “benign symptoms” was admitted to St. Louis on April 25, the French Ministry of Health said on Thursday. He said that after it was determined that he had a contact case linked to the cruise passenger who flew from St. Helena to Johannesburg, he was kept in isolation and underwent medical tests and was confirmed to have hantavirus.

Authorities say the Dutch woman on the cruise ship who later died in South Africa was from St. He said he was on a flight from Helena to Johannesburg. It is not known how many other passengers were among the 88 people on board, but St. Flights from Helena to South Africa are infrequent, normally once a week.

The body of the third German woman who died is still on the ship after she died on May 2.

Tests confirmed that at least five people on the ship had contracted a hantavirus found in South America called Andes virus. The only hantavirus thought to spread from person to person can cause a serious and often fatal lung disease called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome.

The ship has sailed from argentina Research into the source of the epidemic is also focusing there.

The World Health Organization said the Dutch couple who reported the first two cases had taken a birdwatching trip through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay before boarding the ship. They visited sites where mouse species known to carry the Andes virus were found.

According to a written statement given to the AP, the Argentinian Ministry of Health has focused its investigations on the town of Ushuaia, but has not sent a team yet. Scientists from the state-funded Malbrán Institute plan to travel to Ushuaia “in the coming days,” the statement said.

When they arrive in Ushuaia, a 3.5-hour flight from Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires, experts will analyze the rodents in the garbage pile there to see if they carry the Andean virus, officials said.

WHO is working with health authorities in Argentina to understand the couple’s movements and has arranged to send 2,500 diagnostic kits from Argentina to laboratories in five countries.

Argentinian Ministry of Health He said there were 28 deaths due to hantavirus last year, and the average death rate in the previous five years was 15. It was stated that almost a third of the cases last year were fatal.

Quell reported from The Hague, Netherlands, Imray from Cape Town, South Africa, and DeBre from Buenos Aires, Argentina. AP writers Jill Lawless in London and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed.