At least two passengers repatriated from the MV Hondius cruise ship have tested positive for hantavirus.
The two individuals are a French woman and an American man, who have been placed in isolation in their respective countries. The evacuation operations are scheduled to be completed this Monday, before the ship departs for the Netherlands. On Sunday, 94 passengers and crew members of 19 different nationalities were evacuated. Considered "high-risk contacts" by the WHO, all of the affected passengers will be subject to health monitoring for several weeks.
The Geneva-based organization recommends, in particular, a quarantine of up to 42 days to prevent any potential spread of the virus. At this stage, the World Health Organization (WHO) has identified six confirmed cases of hantavirus out of eight suspected cases, including three deaths linked to this rare but previously known virus. The variant of the virus detected aboard the Hondius, the Andes hantavirus, is a rare strain that can be transmitted from person to person with an incubation period of up to six weeks.
Faced with this unexpected health crisis, the regional authorities of the Canary Islands had expressed their opposition to the docking on the archipelago of the MV Hondius, which left on April 1st from Ushuaia in Argentina, with residents also expressing their fears.
