Spanish authorities are preparing to receive more than 140 passengers and crew from the MV Hondius, a Dutch-flagged cruise ship affected by a hantavirus outbreak, officials said. The vessel is expected to reach Tenerife in the Canary Islands on Saturday or Sunday, and evacuees will be brought ashore to a fully isolated, cordoned-off area, Virginia Barcones, Spain’s head of emergency services, said.
The Hondius has already had patients evacuated at other ports: health workers in protective gear removed people from the ship in Praia, Cape Verde. Dutch officials said they are in close contact with the ship’s owner and with the authorities of countries with citizens aboard. The United States has agreed to send a plane to repatriate its 17 citizens on the ship, and the British government said it will charter a plane to evacuate nearly two dozen British nationals.
At least three passengers have died and several others are ill. The World Health Organization has assessed the risk to the broader public as low. Hantaviruses are typically transmitted when people inhale dust contaminated with infected rodent droppings; they are not easily spread between people. Symptoms commonly appear between one and eight weeks after exposure. The ship’s operator, Netherlands-based Oceanwide Expeditions, said none of the remaining passengers or crew are currently displaying symptoms.
Health authorities across four continents have been tracing and monitoring passengers who disembarked the ship before the outbreak was identified. On April 24 — nearly two weeks after the first death on board — more than two dozen people from at least 12 countries reportedly left the ship without contact tracing, Dutch officials and the ship operator said. Health authorities first confirmed hantavirus in a passenger on May 2, the WHO reported.
The WHO also confirmed that a KLM flight attendant who briefly served a flight boarded by an infected cruise passenger tested negative for hantavirus. The flight attendant had worked on an April 25 flight from Johannesburg to Amsterdam and later fell ill; she was placed in isolation in an Amsterdam hospital. The ill cruise passenger — a Dutch woman whose husband died aboard the ship — was too sick to continue to Europe and was removed from the plane in Johannesburg, where she subsequently died. The Dutch public health service is carrying out contact tracing for passengers who had contact with her before she left the flight.
U.K. authorities said a third British national is suspected to have hantavirus; that person is on Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory in the south Atlantic where the Hondius stopped in April. Two other Britons who were on the ship have been confirmed to have the virus: one is hospitalized in the Netherlands and another in South Africa. South African officials are also tracing contacts of passengers who disembarked earlier, focusing in particular on an April 25 flight from St. Helena to Johannesburg, which took place the day after some passengers left the ship.
Authorities continue coordinated international tracing and monitoring to limit further spread and to ensure safe evacuation and repatriation of affected passengers.