Health Officials Downplay Pandemic Risk From Cruise Hantavirus Outbreak

The deadly hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship doesn’t risk triggering the next pandemic, World Health Organization officials said, downplaying an incident that has raised concern about a new viral contagion.

“This is not Covid, this is not influenza,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s director for epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, told reporters Thursday. “This is an outbreak on a ship. We know this virus. This is not the same situation we were in six years ago.”

The Dutch-flagged Hondius is sailing toward the Canary Islands after evacuating three people in Cape Verde on Wednesday. Three passengers have died, six people have contracted the virus and another two are suspected cases.

But while WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described it as “a serious incident,” it is not one that represents a public-health threat — even in the Canary Islands where the passengers will likely disembark.

The outbreak has triggered an international response and grabbed global headlines in an echo of the last pandemic, when cruise ships became symbols of how swiftly a pathogen could move through a confined space. Still, hantavirus is less transmissible than the coronavirus and doctors say it’s also less adept at mutating.

“Frankly, if somebody had said to me ‘Oh, we’re going to see a hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship,’ that would have been the 100th thing I would have thought about,” Emory University epidemiologist Carlos del Rio said at a briefing held by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, citing cruise ship outbreaks of COVID-19, norovirus, influenza. “It’s not in my bingo card.”

Hantavirus is a rare infection typically spread through contact with infected rodent droppings or inhaling contaminated dust. Symptoms can take weeks to appear, and severe cases can progress rapidly to respiratory failure.

Ship Evacuees

One of the people evacuated in Cape Verde on Wednesday was the ship’s doctor, who likely was contaminated caring for the passengers, Van Kerkhove said.

Virologists are racing to locate about 30 passengers who left the ship in Saint Helena, an island in the South Atlantic, and others who might have been exposed to the second cruise participant who died after accompanying the body of her husband off the ship.

The 69-year-old Dutch woman traveled from the island to Johannesburg, South Africa and briefly boarded a KLM flight bound for Amsterdam on April 25 before being deemed unfit to travel. A cabin attendant from the same flight has been hospitalized and tested for hantavirus, according to Dutch health authorities, who said fewer than 10 people on the flight had close contact with the woman.

The Canary Islands’ government, which oversees health care in the archipelago, has questioned why the vessel needed to come there rather than handling the outbreak and evacuating passengers from Cape Verde.

The ship is due to arrive in Tenerife on Sunday. WHO officials said they were confident the risk would be low, and that they were working on a plan for how the passengers and crew would return to their home countries.

The vessel will anchor offshore rather than dock in port, Pedro Gullón, Spain’s director general of public health, said in a briefing Thursday. “Once we know what we are dealing with, if there are no new cases or symptomatic people on board, the process of returning people to their places of origin will begin.”

Photograph: WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus; photo credit: Andy Hayward/Bloomberg

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