CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan health authorities announced Tuesday that three people have died from confirmed hantavirus infections, a rare rodent-borne illness that has seldom been recorded in human cases across the South American nation. Officials emphasized that no evidence has emerged to prove the virus can spread between humans in the currently detected cases.
The nation’s Health Ministry added that two additional deaths of healthcare workers in southwestern Barinas state are currently suspected to be linked to hantavirus. Those cases remain active in investigation, and officials have confirmed no connection between these suspected deaths and the three confirmed fatalities in eastern Anzoátegui state, located roughly 655 kilometers (407 miles) northeast of Barinas. Notably, both affected regions escaped the most severe damage from back-to-back major earthquakes that struck northern Venezuela earlier this month.
Health officials characterized the deaths in both states as isolated events that “do not represent a risk to the general community.” Despite this reassurance, the ministry noted that additional healthcare personnel will be deployed to the affected regions to “guarantee the health security of all Venezuelans,” though no further details on the scope or timeline of the deployment were provided.
The Venezuelan Medical Federation, the country’s leading national professional association for physicians, confirmed the three fatalities in Anzoátegui belonged to the same family residing in the rural municipality of Miranda in the southern part of the state.
Globally, hantaviruses are distributed across every inhabited continent, with primary transmission occurring through direct or indirect contact with wild rodents including rats and mice. Human-to-human spread is extremely uncommon, but severe infections can trigger life-threatening pulmonary inflammation or acute kidney failure. The World Health Organization has tracked growing attention to the pathogen following a deadly outbreak on an Atlantic cruise ship earlier this year that confirmed rare instances of person-to-person transmission.
That May outbreak on the expedition vessel MV Hondius killed three passengers and infected multiple others, linked to the Andes hantavirus — a strain that remains poorly understood by the global scientific community. The outbreak sparked international concern due to the strain’s estimated mortality rate of up to 30 percent, paired with the current absence of targeted antiviral treatments or approved vaccines.
The cruise ship departed from Argentina, and Argentinian public health officials have spent weeks working to trace the origin of the outbreak. Initial official hypotheses speculated that the index case, a Dutch ornithologist, contracted the virus in Ushuaia, Argentina’s southernmost city famous as the popular “end of the world” departure point for Antarctic cruises.
However, recent field testing of wild rodents in the Ushuaia area by Argentinian scientists ruled out the city as the outbreak’s origin. The conclusion has been welcomed by local tourism leaders, as the Antarctic cruise hub relies heavily on international visitor revenue. Earlier this month, Argentine authorities also ruled out the major wine-producing province of Mendoza as the source of contagion, after joint investigations by local researchers and biologists from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found no trace of Andes hantavirus in rodents collected from areas the Dutch researcher and his spouse visited before the voyage.