By Olivia Le Poidevin and Toby Sterling
GENEVA, May 4 (Reuters) – Medics were working on Monday to evacuate two people with symptoms of the deadly hantavirus after a suspected outbreak on a luxury cruise ship held off West Africa carrying mostly British, American and Spanish passengers, officials said.
Around 150 people were still stuck on the vessel after three people – a Dutch couple and a German national – died, and others fell ill, including a Briton who left the vessel and was being treated in South Africa, authorities added.
Hantavirus, which can cause fatal respiratory illness, can be spread when particles from rodent droppings or urine become airborne. It does not transfer easily between humans.
There are no specific drugs to treat the disease, so treatment focuses on supportive care, including putting patients on ventilators in severe cases.
The World Health Organization said the risk to the wider public was low and there was no need for panic or travel restrictions. But authorities in the island nation of Cape Verde said they had not allowed Dutch-flagged MV Hondius to dock as a precaution.
“We’re not just headlines: we’re people with families, with lives, with people waiting for us at home,” Jake Rosmarin, a U.S. travel blogger, said in a tearful Instagram video post from the ship on Monday.
“There is a lot of uncertainty and that is the hardest part,” he added.
‘STRICT PRECAUTIONARY MEASURES’
The ship’s Netherlands-based operator, Oceanwide Expeditions, said it was looking into whether passengers could be screened and disembarked on the islands of Las Palmas and Tenerife.
It was trying to arrange the repatriation of two crew members with symptoms of the disease – one British and one Dutch – along with the body of the German national and a “guest closely associated with the deceased” who does not have symptoms.
“Strict precautionary measures are in process on board,” it said.
The Hondius left Ushuaia in southern Argentina in March, according to company documentation, on a voyage marketed as an Antarctic nature expedition, with berth prices ranging from 14,000 to 22,000 euros ($16,000-$25,000).
It travelled past mainland Antarctica, the Falklands, South Georgia, Nightingale Island, Tristan, St Helena, and Ascension before reaching Cape Verdean waters on May 3.
South Africa’s Health Department confirmed two of the dead were Dutch nationals: a 70-year-old man, who died on St Helena on April 11, and his wife, 69, who died in South Africa after collapsing at O.R. Tambo International Airport.
The British man being treated in a private clinic in Johannesburg became ill on April 27, while the German victim on the ship died on May 2, Oceanwide Expeditions said.
SOURCE NOT YET CLEAR
Hantavirus usually begins with flu-like symptoms, such as fatigue and fever, one to eight weeks after exposure.
A spokesperson for the Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), which is assisting with the outbreak, said its source was unclear.
“You could imagine, for example, that rats on board the ship transmitted the virus,” he said.
“But another possibility is that during a stop somewhere in South America, people were infected, for instance via mice, and became ill that way.”
Daniel Bausch, a Visiting Professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland, said there was some evidence of human-to-human transmission in the Andes Virus, a species of hantavirus found in Argentina and Chile.
“So it’s significant that this cruise ship started its journey in Argentina,” he said.
“The good news is … this is not going to be a big outbreak,” he added.
(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin Toby Sterling, Olivia Kumwenda, Anthony Deutsch, Stephanie van den Berg, Charlotte Van Campenhout; Editing by Miranda Murray, Andrew Heavens and Aidan Lewis)
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