Spanish cruise ship passenger tests positive for hantavirus

A Spanish passenger who was on board the MV Hondius cruise ship has tested positive for hantavirus, taking the total number of cases in the outbreak to 13.

The Spanish health ministry said the patient had been in preventive quarantine at Gomez Ulla Hospital in Madrid since disembarking from the vessel in Tenerife on May 10.

It is the second case to be confirmed among the 14 Spaniards who were on board the cruise in the South Atlantic where the illness broke out in April. A Dutch couple and a German passenger died, while the other cases are all linked to the vessel.

On Friday the World Health Organization said a crew member who was quarantining at home in the Netherlands had tested positive for the virus.

The new case was not among the 27 crew members who stayed on board the ship after the other 122 passengers and crew were evacuated from Tenerife. Health officials said they had had close contact with infected passengers.

Outbreak “stable”

The Vlissingen-registered vessel docked in Rotterdam last Monday where it underwent a deep cleaning process. Most of the crew members who stayed on board are from the Philippines and will have to spend spend six weeks quarantining in temporary buildings before they can go home.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, said at the weekend that the outbreak was “stable for now”.

Quarantining and monitoring will continue until June 21 beacuse the Andes virus has an incubation period of up to six weeks, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said.

The WHO is working on the basis that the first passenger who died, a 70-year-old man from Haulerwijk in Friesland, was already infected when he boarded the ship.

He is likely to have caught the virus while travelling in Argentina with his wife, aged 69, who fell sick after leaving the ship to travel back to the Netherlands and died in hospital in South Africa.

A 65-year-old German woman died on board, while other passengers who fell sick included the ship’s doctor and a replacement doctor who flew out to join the cruise.