France, Spain and Greece have placed people who disembarked from a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak into quarantine in hospital as further passengers tested positive for the rare but serious infection.
One Spaniard who is quarantining in Madrid after being rescued from the vessel has tested positive for hantavirus, the health ministry said on Monday.
The remaining 13 Spaniards quarantining at the same military hospital tested negative for the virus, the ministry said. The patient presented no symptoms and was in a good condition, the ministry said.
[ Two Irish passengers from hantavirus-hit cruise ship return home ]
The MV Hondius left the dock in the Canary Island of Tenerife on Monday evening, after 120 people from 23 nations were repatriated over 48 hours in an operation described by Spanish authorities as “complex” and “unprecedented”. Twenty-six crew and two health workers remained on the ship as it headed to Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
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Despite the deaths of three people who had been onboard the ship, and eight other confirmed cases, doctors from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the Spanish foreign health service assessed the French woman and dismissed her symptoms as anxiety or stress, Padilla said.
“They were not thinking that these symptoms were compatible with hantavirus. Why? Because what she was telling [them] was [that she had] an episode of coughing some days ago that had disappeared, and what she was having at that moment was kind of like stress or anxiety or nervousness. So it was not catalogued [as hantavirus],” Padilla said.
In France, the government there issued a decree stating that all those deemed to be contact cases would be placed in health facilities for assessment for 72 hours, before being “kept in quarantine or placed in isolation for a total duration of 42 days”.
“Our public health response is clear: all contacts, without exception, must undergo strict quarantine in a hospital setting,” prime minister Sébastien Lecornu said.
Contract tracing has identified 22 people so far in France who were on the cruise ship or who travelled on planes with people who turned out to be infected.
It came as a French woman who had been evacuated from the cruise ship this weekend and was placed in quarantine in a Paris hospital specialising in infectious disease tested positive for hantavirus.
She began to feel seriously unwell on Sunday and was now in intensive care in a “stable condition”, Lecornu said.
Twelve other French citizens are undergoing quarantine in hospital, while a further group of 14 passengers who were on a flight from Johannesburg to Amsterdam with a woman who later died of the virus have been contacted by health authorities.
United States authorities said that one evacuated passenger had tested “mildly positive” and another had “mild symptoms”. All 17 repatriated US citizens are to “undergo clinical assessment and receive appropriate care and support based on their condition”.
The WHO has warned that additional cases may emerge among evacuated passengers because hantavirus has a very long incubation period, meaning it can take up to eight weeks after exposure for symptoms to appear.
“We risk seeing new cases in the coming days or weeks,” said Olivier le Polain, an epidemiologist at the WHO, during a press briefing.
Because the disease has a long incubation period, authorities are recommending long quarantine periods to ensure no further chain of infection.
In Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom evacuated passengers are allowed to return home but must remain in isolation for 42-45 days. Belgian and British authorities said that they would be monitored closely by health workers.
Greek authorities said that the one Greek national who was aboard would be kept in quarantine at the Attikon General University Hospital of Athens for 45 days.
In total the outbreak has infected nine people, three of whom have died, according to the WHO, with laboratory tests identifying the infections as the Andes strain of the virus.
Health officials have stressed that hantavirus spreads with much greater difficulty than infections like flu, with infection spreading through prolonged close contact rather than casual exposure.
“We have been repeating the same answer many times,” WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “This is not another Covid. And the risk to the public is low. So they shouldn’t be scared, and they shouldn’t panic.” – Additional reporting: Reuters and The Guardian.
This article has been amended in light of an error in a Guardian report
