Two suspected virus cases found in Spain, remote island
Health experts are racing to contain the potential spread of hantavirus as two suspected cases have emerged far from the luxury cruise ship where the outbreak began.
Recent reports included a man who became ill after leaving the ship and a woman who became ill after sitting next to an infected passenger on a plane.
The incidents reported by health authorities thousands of kilometers apart, one in Spain and the other on the remote South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha, are separate from the World Health Organization’s tally of eight people who fell ill aboard the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius.
Three of these people died. Six of eight suspected cases have been confirmed to be hantavirus, a potentially fatal disease often carried and spread by rodents, WHO officials said Friday.
The announcement of new cases away from the ship raised concerns that the virus was spreading more widely; but WHO officials have repeatedly said the risk to the public is not high and the virus is not easily transmitted.
“We continue to assess the risk to the general population as low, based on the dynamics of this outbreak and how it spreads and does not spread between people on the ship and people off the ship,” Anais Legand, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for viral threats, said in an online briefing. he said.
Testing determined that the Hondius outbreak involved Andes virus, the only type of hantavirus known to have limited transmission between humans through close, prolonged contact, according to the World Health Organization.
The ship was carrying 147 passengers and crew when WHO was notified of serious respiratory illnesses among passengers on 3 May.
According to media reports, another 34 passengers had left the ship by then; According to media reports, the ship, which first set sail from Argentina in March, headed north to the waters off Cape Verde in western Africa, with stops in Antarctica and other places.
The ship was held there for a short time after news of the epidemic emerged.
Four patients remained hospitalized in South Africa, the Netherlands and Switzerland on Friday.
Ship operator Oceanwide said there was no one on board showing signs of possible infection.
Hondius was expected to depart for Tenerife in the Canary Islands on Friday and dock there early Sunday.
Arriving passengers and crew will be screened before disembarkation, under guidelines that have not yet been finalized by the World Health Organization and other health institutions.
Oceanwide said there were 17 US citizens on board.
A 32-year-old woman in Spain’s southeastern province of Alicante was diagnosed with symptoms consistent with hantavirus infection and was tested, Spanish health officials said.
She was briefly on the plane, sitting two rows behind a Dutch woman who caught the virus in Hondius.
The woman left the plane in Johannesburg feeling ill before takeoff on April 25 and later died in hospital.
The country’s Health Security Agency said a British man was suspected of carrying the disease in Tristan da Cunha.
Authorities said he was a passenger on the Hondius, which was on the island from April 13 to April 15.
The three people who died following the outbreak were a Dutch couple and a German citizen.
The other four people confirmed to be infected – two Britons, a Dutch national and a Swiss national – were still being treated in hospitals in the Netherlands, South Africa and Switzerland.
