Two suspected virus cases found in Spain, remote island
Jennifer Rigby and Bart H Meijer |
Health experts are racing to contain a potential spread of hantavirus as two suspected cases emerged far from the luxury cruise liner where the outbreak started.
The latest reports involved a man who fell ill after leaving the ship and a woman who became sick after sitting near an infected cruise passenger on a plane.
The occurrences reported by health officials thousands of kilometres apart – one in Spain, the other on the remote South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha – are separate from the World Health Organisation’s tally of eight people who became ill aboard the Dutch-flagged ship MV Hondius.
Three of those people have died. WHO officials said on Friday six of the eight suspected cases had been confirmed as hantavirus, a potentially fatal disease typically carried and spread by rodents.
The announcements of new cases far from the vessel fuelled concern about a wider spread of the virus, although WHO officials have repeatedly said the risk to the public at large is not high and the virus is not transmitted easily.
“Based on the dynamics of this outbreak, based on how it is spreading and not spreading amongst the people on the ship, the people who have disembarked, as well, we continue to consider the risk as low for the general population,” Anais Legand, WHO technical officer for viral threats, said in an online briefing.
Testing has determined that the Hondius outbreak involves the Andes virus, the only hantavirus species known to be capable of limited transmission between humans, according to the WHO, through close and prolonged contact.
The ship was carrying 147 passengers and crew when a cluster of severe respiratory illnesses among passengers was reported to the WHO on May 3.
By then, 34 other passengers had departed the vessel, including one of four Australians, according to media reports, which first sailed from Argentina in March with stops in the Antarctic and other locations before heading north to waters off Cape Verde west of Africa.
The vessel was briefly held there after news of the outbreak emerged.
Four patients remained in hospital on Friday in South Africa, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
Oceanwide, the cruise operator, said there were no people with symptoms of a possible infection remaining on the vessel.
The Hondius was on the way on Friday to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and was expected to dock there early on Sunday.
Arriving passengers and crew will be screened before disembarking under guidelines still being finalised by the WHO and other health agencies.
Oceanwide said 17 US citizens were aboard.
A 32-year-old woman in the southeastern Spanish province of Alicante was diagnosed with symptoms consistent with a hantavirus infection and was being tested, Spanish health authorities said.
She was briefly sitting on a plane two rows behind a Dutch woman who had contracted the virus on the Hondius.
The woman left the flight in Johannesburg feeling ill before it took off on April 25 and later died at a hospital.
A British man was suspected of having the disease on Britain’s Tristan da Cunha, the nation’s Health Security Agency said.
Officials said he was a passenger on the Hondius, which was at the island from April 13 to April 15.
The three people who have died following the outbreak were a Dutch couple and a German national.
Four others confirmed to be infected – two Britons, a Dutch person and a Swiss national – were still being treated at hospitals in the Netherlands, South Africa and Switzerland.
Reuters