Five American cruise ship passengers exposed to hantavirus are leaving a Nebraska quarantine facility. U.S. health officials say they will complete monitoring at home after remaining symptom-free. They arrived in Nebraska three weeks ago following a deadly hantavirus outbreak on a South Atlantic cruise. The virus usually spreads through rodent droppings, but the Andes virus may spread between people in rare cases. Thirteen cases, including three deaths, are linked to the ship. There have been no U.S. cases connected to the ship, and the risk remains low. Federal officials arranged non-commercial travel with biocontainment measures for the five passengers.
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A cruise ship at the center of a deadly hantavirus outbreak is undergoing further cleaning before it returns to its home port. In a written statement Tuesday, Oceanwide Expeditions says the extra work is being carried out on the advice of the GGD local health authority in the port city of Rotterdam, where the vessel returned early last week. It did not elaborate on why extra cleaning was required and the health authority did not immediately have a comment on the reason it asked for the further measures. World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said over the weekend that 12 hantavirus cases linked to the ship's voyage and three deaths have been reported to the organization.
South African infectious disease expert Lucille Blumberg was part of a team that identified a hantavirus outbreak on a Dutch cruise ship. On May 1, Blumberg received an urgent email about a passenger evacuated to a Johannesburg hospital with suspected pneumonia. The ship, MV Hondius, had other sick passengers. Within 24 hours, Blumberg and her team confirmed the illness was hantavirus, a rare, rodent-borne virus. The World Health Organization then informed the ship. The British man who was the first confirmed case is improving. Three others have died. The ship has been disinfected in Rotterdam. Blumberg emphasized the importance of a quick response.
The city of Ushuaia in Argentina, which bills itself as the “end of the world,” has found itself at the center of a global media storm involving a deadly hantavirus outbreak on a cruise that departed from its port. Tourism operators and officials are scrambling to stem fallout from the nautical nightmare that they fear could cause foreigners to reconsider their Antarctic cruise plans. Tourism is an economic lifeline for the wider province of Tierra del Fuego. Argentine scientists searching for the source of the outbreak arrived Monday in the city. They plan to capture and analyze rodents for the possible presence of the virus that has never been recorded in the province.
AP Wire
A cruise ship hit by a deadly hantavirus outbreak has docked at the Dutch port of Rotterdam for disinfection. The MV Hondius reached Rotterdam on Monday morning, carrying 25 crew members and two medical personnel. All passengers had disembarked already. The crew will enter immediate quarantine. During the outbreak, three passengers died, including a Dutch couple believed to have been exposed in South America. The outbreak has reached at least 11 cases, with nine confirmed. The ship will be decontaminated based on Dutch public health guidelines before being allowed to sail again.
Cruise ship hit by hantavirus outbreak arrives in the Dutch port of Rotterdam for disinfection.
Recent outbreaks of hantavirus and norovirus on cruise ships are making headlines, but they’re unlikely to dim vacationers’ growing love of cruises. CruiseCompete.com, an online cruise marketplace, said it booked 31.7% more cabins in the first two weeks of May than it did during the same period last year. And Viking said earlier this week that demand softened slightly in the first quarter after the Iran war began before picking up steam again. Rob Kwortnik, an associate professor at Cornell University’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration, said current news cycles rarely impact cruise demand because cruises are generally booked at least 6 months — and often as much as a year – in advance.
Canadian officials have reported that one of four Canadians returning from a cruise ship with a hantavirus outbreak has a “presumptive positive” test result. Confirmation from the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg is expected soon. British Columbia's public health officer says the patient in their 70s is stable with mild symptoms. The outbreak on the MV Hondius has led to three deaths and 12 cases. Nine of them are confirmed. Henry reassures that hantavirus isn't like COVID-19 and lacks pandemic potential. She emphasizes that infection control measures are in place to ensure public safety.
Six passengers from a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak have arrived in Australia for a quarantine expected to last at least three weeks. The jet carrying five Australians and one person from New Zealand landed Friday at an air base outside Perth in Western Australia. The passengers and crew were to spend their quarantine in a facility built for the COVID-19 pandemic. Australia's health minister says all six tested negative for the virus. Three people among the 11 cases in the hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius ship have died. The ship was on a cruise from Argentina to the Antarctic and then to several South Atlantic islands when the outbreak was identified.
The coronavirus pandemic's impact lingers, influencing our lives in both obvious and subtle ways. Work-from-home jobs, mask-wearing and hand sanitizers are now common. Some effects are less visible, like grief, chronic health conditions and interrupted lives. Recently, a rare hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship sparked fears of another pandemic. Despite reassurances of low risk, the fear highlights a deeper issue: There's been an erosion of trust. It raises questions about who people now rely on for guidance and understanding. Arizona State University research professor and sociologist Elisa Jayne Bienenstock says COVID-19 undermined confidence in science for people who don’t understand how science works.