分类： health

A new chapter of uncertainty unfolded this Thursday when another symptomatic passenger from the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship MV Hondius was evacuated to Europe, as the vessel makes its way toward the Spanish island of Tenerife and public health authorities around the world race to trace the spread of the rare, potentially fatal human-transmissible strain. Three deaths linked to the outbreak have triggered international alarm, though leading global health bodies have sought to reassure the public that a widespread global pandemic is highly unlikely, noting the virus is far less contagious than the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused COVID-19.

Currently, people confirmed or suspected to have contracted the Andes hantavirus strain from the cruise are receiving medical care or completing isolation periods across five nations: Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and South Africa. The scope of potential exposure widened this week when Dutch flag carrier KLM confirmed one of its air stewards is undergoing testing for the virus after potential contact with an infected passenger on a commercial flight.

Hantavirus is an uncommon respiratory pathogen that most often transfers to humans from infected rodent populations. It can trigger severe health complications including respiratory failure, cardiac impairment and hemorrhagic fever. Currently, no licensed vaccine exists to prevent infection, and there is no targeted cure for the disease — available care is limited to managing and easing symptoms as the body fights the infection. The variant detected on the MV Hondius, the Andes strain, is a particularly rare variation capable of spreading directly from person to person.

Health investigators currently believe the index case, the first infected passenger, contracted the virus before boarding the vessel in Ushuaia, Argentina. The virus has an incubation period ranging from one to six weeks, allowing it to spread to other passengers and crew during the ship’s transatlantic voyage. According to a statement released by the cruise’s operator, Netherlands-based Oceanwide Expeditions, Thursday’s evacuation flight carrying the sick passenger landed in Amsterdam, 24 hours after three other infected passengers were evacuated from the vessel. The company also confirmed that no currently symptomatic individuals remain on board as the ship sails toward its scheduled stop in Tenerife.

The UK Health Security Agency has confirmed two passengers who returned to the United Kingdom from the cruise are asymptomatic and have been instructed to self-isolate as a precaution. Officials emphasized the overall risk to the general UK public remains “very low.”

Global health leadership has echoed this cautious optimism. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday that “the risk to the rest of the world is low,” and a full press briefing from Tedros was scheduled for Thursday. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention echoed the assessment, noting that “at this time, the risk to the American public is extremely low.”

Back in Argentina, public health teams are preparing to test local rodent populations in Ushuaia, the coastal departure city where the MV Hondius began its voyage on April 1. The first death linked to the outbreak occurred on April 11, when a Dutch passenger who had boarded the ship with his wife died. At the time, the captain attributed the death to natural causes, so no public health alarm was raised, according to Ruhi Cenet, a Turkish travel vlogger who was a passenger on the voyage.

The cruise operator confirmed the man’s body was removed from the ship on April 24 at the South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where 29 other passengers also disembarked. “These guests have all been contacted by Oceanwide Expeditions. We are working to establish details of all passengers and crew who embarked and disembarked on various stops of Hondius since March 20,” the company statement read.

Public health officials only activated a full response after the man’s wife, who disembarked to accompany her husband’s body to South Africa, also fell ill and died 15 days later. Hantavirus was confirmed as the cause of her death on May 4. Argentine health officials note the couple had traveled through Chile, Uruguay and Argentina before boarding the cruise. The infected woman traveled on a commercial Airlink flight from Saint Helena to Johannesburg while already showing symptoms. That flight carried 82 passengers and six crew, and contact tracers are working to reach every person on board to monitor for potential infection.

KLM’s confirmation of a testing steward marked the latest development in contact tracing efforts. The airline previously confirmed that one of the deceased passengers had been briefly on an April 25 KLM flight from Johannesburg to Amsterdam, but was removed from the aircraft before it departed. To date, there are still minor discrepancies in official counts of how many people were on the MV Hondius at different stages of the voyage. When the vessel anchored off Cape Verde, it carried 149 people including 88 passengers, according to the operator; however, the company confirmed that 114 passengers and an unspecified number of crew were on board when the voyage departed Argentina on April 1.

A deadly hantavirus outbreak on a polar expedition cruise ship has sparked sharp criticism from a passenger who says crew leadership downplayed the risk of infection and allowed normal operations to continue even after the first death was recorded.

Turkish travel vlogger Ruhi Cenet, 35, joined the 88-passenger MV Hondius in Ushuaia, Argentina on April 1 to document a stop at Tristan da Cunha, the remote South Atlantic archipelago. The voyage began as a comfortable, idyllic journey: the ship carried 59 crew members to cater to guests, most of whom were senior amateur birdwatchers aged 60 and older. The calm routine shattered on the morning of April 12, when the captain announced over the ship’s intercom that a 70-year-old Dutch passenger had died the previous day.

In video footage Cenet recorded on board, the captain told passengers that the ship’s doctor had confirmed there was no risk of infection, and attributed the death to natural causes. At the time, leadership did not even consider that a highly contagious pathogen could be spreading through the vessel – a decision Cenet calls deeply reckless, even as the ship’s own British doctor would later develop severe symptoms consistent with hantavirus infection.

“What shocked me most was that life went on completely as usual after the announcement,” Cenet told AFP in a remote interview. Videos he shared show elderly passengers continuing to gather for buffet meals with no social distancing or face coverings. Out of an abundance of caution, Cenet and his cameraman began self-isolating in their cabin immediately, despite having no confirmed information about a virus outbreak.

Three people on the MV Hondius have now died from the virus: the initial Dutch victim, his wife, and a German female passenger. The World Health Organization has confirmed that at least five additional passengers have definite or probable cases of hantavirus, a rare zoonotic disease that causes severe respiratory illness and can be fatal in untreated cases.

Cenet says he remains deeply troubled by the ship’s scheduled stop at Tristan da Cunha days after the first death, when all passengers were allowed to disembark and interact with the island’s small local population. “It’s the most remote inhabited island on Earth, with almost no hospital infrastructure and barely any doctors,” he explained. “That’s my biggest regret – we shouldn’t have landed there after the first fatality. It could have turned into a worst-case scenario for the islanders.”

Cenet and around 20 other passengers disembarked at the British overseas territory of Saint Helena on April 24. The next day, he boarded a repatriation flight to South Africa – alongside the first victim’s wife, who was already showing severe symptoms. She died less than 24 hours after boarding the flight. After clearing processing in South Africa, Cenet returned to his home in Istanbul, where Turkish health authorities told he did not need mandatory quarantine as long as he showed no symptoms. He has continued voluntary self-isolation out of caution.

The MV Hondius spent weeks quarantined in waters off Cape Verde, and on Wednesday departed for Spain’s Canary Islands. An acquaintance still on board told Cenet that passengers are now required to isolate in their cabins and wear face coverings when in shared spaces. Looking back, Cenet argues that expedition cruise lines operating in remote regions lack basic emergency infrastructure to handle disease outbreaks. Passengers paid roughly $10,000 each for the voyage, he noted, and the ship relied on just one physician to handle all medical needs.

“I think these kinds of ships should have on-site labs and all the necessary emergency equipment to handle outbreaks when you’re thousands of miles from the nearest major hospital,” Cenet said. “One doctor simply isn’t enough.”

A rare, human-transmissible hantavirus outbreak on the Dutch-flagged polar expedition cruise ship MV Hondius has triggered an ongoing international public health response, with evacuations of infected individuals off the vessel underway Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed. The ship, which carries 88 passengers and 59 crew members hailing from 23 different nationalities, has remained anchored off the coast of Cape Verde near the capital Praia since Sunday, after Cape Verdean authorities barred it from docking to contain the potential spread of the virus. As of Wednesday, three people believed to be infected — two crew members and one passenger — are being evacuated from the vessel, with all three currently in stable condition, and one showing no symptoms at all, according to Ann Lindstrand, WHO’s representative in Cape Verde. The crisis first emerged on Saturday, when global health officials were alerted that three people linked to the cruise had already died from suspected hantavirus exposure, marking the start of an international health scare that has stretched across four continents. The MV Hondius departed on its polar expedition from Ushuaia, Argentina on April 1, with the first infected person developing symptoms as early as April 6. Investigators are still working to trace the origin of the outbreak on the ship. Health officials have now confirmed the outbreak is caused by the Andes strain of hantavirus, the only known variant of the disease that can spread from person to person. “As we said, we want to repeat again, such transmission is very rare and only happens due to very close contact between people,” South African Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi told a parliamentary committee Wednesday. This confirmation was echoed by Geneva University Hospital, which added that the Andes strain is responsible for all three recorded deaths linked to the outbreak. Hantavirus is most commonly spread to humans from infected rodents via exposure to their urine, feces, or saliva, and human-to-human transmission has only ever been documented in previous Andes strain outbreaks in South America, where the virus circulates naturally in local animal populations. Concerns of wider community spread grew this week after it emerged that a symptomatic Dutch woman who disembarked from the cruise traveled on a commercial passenger flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, where she died on April 26. The flight, operated by South African carrier Airlink, carried 82 passengers and six crew members, and contact tracing efforts are now active to locate and test all people who shared the flight with the infected traveler. On Wednesday, Swiss health authorities also confirmed that a former passenger from the MV Hondius had been hospitalized with a confirmed hantavirus infection in Zurich. Earlier this week, the cruise line’s Dutch operator, Oceanwide Expeditions, announced that the three evacuated individuals would be airlifted to the Netherlands for treatment, after which the remaining passengers and crew would sail the ship to Spain’s Canary Islands, the closest location with adequate medical and public health facilities to support the response. Spanish health ministry officials confirmed Tuesday that the ship is expected to reach the Canary Islands in three to four days. To date, the WHO has confirmed two cases of hantavirus linked to the ship: the deceased Dutch woman and a British passenger who remains in intensive care in Johannesburg. Five additional suspected cases are still being investigated. Multiple passengers and crew have already entered isolation on board the anchored vessel to prevent further spread of the virus among people on the ship.

A life-threatening bacterial disease that has not been detected in Western Australia for more than half a century is now spreading rapidly across regional parts of the state, pushing case numbers to alarming levels and prompting public health officials to issue an urgent plea for vaccination across all age groups.

In just five months, WA Health has confirmed 60 new diphtheria cases across the state. The vast majority of these infections have been recorded among Indigenous communities in the Kimberley region, with only a small handful of additional cases detected in the neighboring Pilbara and Goldfields areas. A spokesperson for the department noted that infections have been concentrated mostly among children and young adults, though a small share of cases have affected older age groups.

Diphtheria is a highly contagious bacterial infection that can cause severe, potentially fatal complications if left untreated. The disease spreads easily through multiple pathways: close contact with respiratory droplets from an infected person, direct contact with open, infected skin lesions, or exposure to contaminated objects such as used bandages and shared personal items like towels. There are two primary forms of the infection: respiratory diphtheria and cutaneous diphtheria.

Respiratory diphtheria, the more dangerous variant, typically starts with mild, flu-like symptoms including a sore throat, fever, and chills. As the infection progresses, it can develop a thick gray coating at the back of the throat that severely obstructs breathing and swallowing. Cutaneous diphtheria, by contrast, causes slow-healing open sores and ulcers on exposed areas of the body. While this form rarely causes severe systemic illness, health officials emphasize it plays a major role in spreading the bacteria to other people across communities.

Western Australia’s Chief Health Officer Dr. Clare Huppatz explained that diphtheria had been effectively eliminated in Australia for decades, thanks to widespread routine vaccination programs and improvements in public living conditions. Before this current surge, respiratory diphtheria had not been documented in Western Australia for more than 50 years, and even skin infections had become extremely rare. However, Dr. Huppatz noted that the disease has begun to reemerge across parts of northern Australia in recent years, with the neighboring Northern Territory also declaring a formal diphtheria outbreak in recent weeks.

The unexpected resurgence of the disease serves as a critical reminder that continued vaccination and booster doses are essential to maintain long-term population immunity, particularly for adolescents and adults, Dr. Huppatz said. Diphtheria vaccines are almost always administered in combination with vaccines for tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough), as part of standard national immunization schedules.

With cases concentrated in remote and regional communities, public health authorities are particularly focused on reaching people who live, work, or travel through these high-risk areas. Officials stress that all people in these regions should ensure their vaccinations are up to date. For those who have previously completed a primary vaccination course but have not had a booster in more than five years, a top-up dose is recommended — this guidance is especially urgent for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in affected regions, as well as local healthcare workers, who face a higher risk of exposure to the bacteria.

Individuals who are unvaccinated against diphtheria, or who cannot confirm their vaccination status, are advised to contact their general practitioner or local health provider immediately to begin a recommended vaccination series. Officials also issued a direct reminder to parents and caregivers to ensure their children receive all routine childhood diphtheria vaccinations on schedule, including all recommended booster doses, to protect them from infection early in life.