Hantavirus on cruise ship: 23 passengers return home, one more infection confirmed

At least 23 passengers from the hantavirus-infected cruise ship MV Hondius have been evacuated from the ship and returned to their homes, including the United States. However, according to a report published by Spanish newspaper EL País, one of the evacuated passengers has also gotten sick, raising concerns among many.

As per the report, the travellers did not realise that they had been exposed to the virus, which has a mortality rate of up to 40 per cent. The Spanish news outlet stated that when the travellers left the expedition vessel during its stop at Saint Helena, a tiny island in the South Atlantic, on April 23, one of them fell sick.

More from World

“23 people are wandering around there, and until three days ago, no one had contacted them,” the passenger told the Spanish newspaper, El País. “The Australians went back to Australia, the ones from Taiwan to Taiwan, the Americans to all corners of North America. The Englishman to England, the Dutch to their homes… I don’t remember the rest.”

A Swiss man fell sick

According to the report, one of those passengers was a Swiss man who had returned home with his wife and tested positive for hantavirus on Wednesday. The authorities maintained that the patient was initially taken to a Zurich hospital and tested negative for the virus, which can lie dormant for up to eight weeks.

He was just one of many expedition passengers who decided to hit the road during the Dutch vessel’s two-day stop in the British territory last month. In the midst of this, Argentine investigators now believe that a Dutch couple was responsible for bringing the virus on board.

The probe found that the couple picked it up from rodents while visiting a landfill during a bird-watching tour in the city of Ushuaia days before the ship departed from the Argentine port on March 20. It is pertinent to note that both husband and wife in question are now dead.

However, one hole has emerged in the aforementioned theory, with authorities previously stating that the area and the surrounding province of Tierra del Fuego had never recorded a case of the hantavirus. While the Hantavirus usually spreads through rat droppings, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that this one is a rare strain of hantavirus that can spread between people — the Andes virus – is the culprit behind the Hondius outbreak.

Amidst the chaos, the WHO said that national governments have begun contact tracing the patients, but experts say there is unlikely to be widespread infection from the outbreak, because hantavirus isn’t nearly as contagious as, say, COVID-19.

“It requires large saliva droplets from talking to people. Close, person-to-person spread,” said Ali Khan, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Centre — one of the top infectious disease research hospitals in the world. He added: “We’re probably looking at more than a ‘Hello, how are you?’