At leasteight passengers have been sickened, including three who died, in a hantavirus outbreak aboard a Dutch cruise ship. Today, the World Health Organization (WHO) said three ill passengers had been airlifted to the Netherlands to get medical care early this morning.
The ship, the MV Hondius, is also on the move, leaving Cabo Verde, where it was moored, for the Canary Islands, where the government of Spain said people will be able to deboard and travel home if they are healthy.
Also today, a patient who had been on the ship and subsequently became ill in Switzerland is now hospitalized with confirmed hantavirus. That patient was sickened with the Andes strain, which is found in South America. The Andes strain is also the only hantavirus strain to have documented person-to-person transmission, but it is considered rare and usually linked to close contact.
Among the eight suspected cases, only three have been confirmed by laboratory testing to be hantavirus.
This is not the next COVID, but it is a serious infectious disease.
Officials today from WHO said the risk to the general population is still very low at this time. “This is not the next COVID, but it is a serious infectious disease,” Maria Van Kerkhove, PhD, WHO’s director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, told the Associated Press.“Most people will never be exposed to this.”
Swiss patient left ship in late April
The case-patient in Switzerland was traveling with his wife on the ship but left the boat in late April, returning home to Switzerland. According to the Swiss ministry of health, he consulted his family doctor by phone after experiencing symptoms in recent days and went toUniversity Hospital Zurich. The patient’s wife currently has no symptoms and is in self-isolation.
Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), which publishes CIDRAP News, said the timeline of the first patient illnesses suggests that people contracted the virus before boarding the ship earlier in April. “Hantavirus typically has a 10- to 20-day incubation period,” he said.
Osterholm said though questions remain on the transmission route, there is nothing to suggest this is a COVID-19–like event. Hantavirus infection is rare, and transmission linked to inhaling particles from rodent droppings is far more common than person-to-person transmission. “We need to gather more information, but this is an isolated event,” he said.
