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Spanish authorities on Friday were preparing to receive more than 140 passengers and crew onboard a hantavirus-stricken cruise ship headed for the Canary Islands, where health officials say they will perform careful evacuations.
The MV Hondius is expected to reach the Spanish island of Tenerife, off the coast of West Africa, on Saturday or Sunday.
“They will arrive at a completely isolated, cordoned-off area,” said Virginia Barcones, Spain’s head of emergency services, on Thursday.
Spain is co-ordinating with governments whose citizens are on board the ship about evacuation plans, Barcones said.
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The United States will send a plane to repatriate its 17 citizens from the cruise ship, she said. The British government also said it will charter a plane to bring home nearly two dozen of its people.
Canadian consular officials are also en route to meet four Canadians who remain on board.
Three of the ship’s passengers have died — a Dutch couple and a German national. The World Health Organization (WHO) says the strain of the virus in this outbreak, the Andes strain, is the only one in which human-to-human transmission has ever been detected. And yet WHO officials say the risk to the wider public is low.
The WHO says a hantavirus cruise ship outbreak is serious but unlikely to spark a new pandemic, despite confirmed human-to-human transmission and an international contact-tracing effort.
None of the remaining passengers or crew on the ship are currently symptomatic, the ship’s operator, Netherlands-based Oceanwide Expeditions, said Thursday.
Meanwhile, health authorities across four continents were continuing to track down and monitor passengers who disembarked the ship before the outbreak was detected, and are trying to trace others who may have come into contact with them since then.
More than two dozen people from at least 12 different countries left the ship on April 24, nearly two weeks after the first death, when it docked at the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena on April 24, Oceanwide and Dutch officials said Thursday.
Canadians isolating in Ontario and Quebec
Two Canadians were among those who disembarked on St. Helena, and according to federal officials are isolating at home in Ontario, as is a third Canadian who was not on the vessel, but who may have come into contact with a symptomatic individual. That person is isolating at home in Quebec, according to that province’s health minister.
On Friday, U.K. health authorities said a British national — on the remote British territory Tristan da Cunha — is suspected to have the hantavirus. There was no word on their condition.
Four others confirmed to be infected, two Britons, a Dutch and a Swiss national, are being treated in hospitals in the Netherlands, South Africa and Switzerland.
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The MV Hondius set off from southern Argentina on April 1.
The first two cases were the Dutch couple, who had travelled through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay before boarding the ship, the WHO said. They visited sites where the species of rat known to carry the Andes strain was present.
The hospitalized Dutch national was the ship’s doctor. A retired oncologist, Stephen Kornfeld, told The Atlantic in an article published Thursday that he was pressed into duty to assist passengers beginning on May 1, after the doctor needed to self-isolate.
Symptoms of hantavirus can initially present as flu-like in nature. Patients who develop hantavirus pulmonary syndrome can experience tightness in the chest as the lungs fill with fluid, and respiratory problems.
Symptoms usually show between one to six weeks, or more, after infection. The other syndrome caused by hantavirus — known as hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, which can cause bleeding, high fever, and kidney failure — usually develops within a week or two after exposure.
Death rates vary by which hantavirus causes the illness. Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome is fatal in about 35 per cent of cases, while the death rate for hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome varies from one per cent to 15 per cent of patients, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
Weeks ago, passengers on a luxury Antarctic cruise began showing symptoms of the Andes strain of hantavirus, which can be life-threatening and — in rare cases — transmitted from person to person. Now, after three confirmed hantavirus deaths and several other suspected cases, roughly 150 passengers remain stranded at sea on the MV Hondius. Andrew Chang breaks down the Andes strain and what we know so far about how everything unfolded.
(Photo credits: The Canadian Press, Reuters, Adobe Stock and Getty Images)
