A rodent-borne hantavirus outbreak aboard the Dutch-flagged expedition ship MV Hondius killed three passengers and sickened several others as the vessel sailed across the South Atlantic, health authorities said, triggering a multinational effort to quarantine and test travelers repatriated from more than 20 countries.
The ship, operated by Oceanwide Expeditions, departed Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1 with stops scheduled in Antarctica and remote South Atlantic islands. The first death came just 10 days later, when a 70-year-old Dutch man developed fever, headache and mild diarrhea and rapidly deteriorated into respiratory distress, dying on board on April 11. The cruise company said the cause of death could not be determined at the time.
His wife, who had traveled with him through Argentina and Chile before boarding, fell ill after the ship reached the British territory of Tristan da Cunha and St. Helena. She disembarked on April 24 with more than two dozen other passengers at St. Helena and took a commercial flight to South Africa, where she collapsed at an airport while trying to board a plane home and died the next day, on April 26.
The World Health Organization later identified the pathogen as the Andes virus, the only hantavirus known to spread from person to person, which is endemic to rodent populations in South America, primarily Argentina and Chile. Health authorities stressed that person-to-person transmission is rare and that the overall threat to the broader public remains very low. The virus cannot be transmitted easily between people, WHO said, though contact tracing is essential given the ship’s multiple port calls and the dispersal of passengers who left before the outbreak was confirmed.
The virus was identified only after a British man who fell sick on April 27 was evacuated to Ascension Island and then to South Africa, where he tested positive for hantavirus on May 2, the same day a third passenger, a German woman, died aboard the ship while it sailed toward Cape Verde. South African health officials later confirmed an additional positive from the Dutch woman’s posthumous sample, and a man who left the ship at St. Helena also tested positive in Switzerland, bringing the confirmed cases to five.
As the ship arrived in Cape Verde waters on May 3, authorities there refused to allow anyone to disembark, sending health workers aboard instead. A two-day standoff ensued, with two crew members, including the ship’s doctor, seriously ill. Spain agreed to accept the vessel, and the three ill people were evacuated to European hospitals before the Hondius set sail for the Canary Islands.
The Hondius anchored off Tenerife on May 10, where passengers and crew were escorted to shore by Spanish personnel in full-body protective gear and breathing masks. In a major repatriation operation, aircraft from Spain, France, Canada, the Netherlands, Britain, Ireland, Turkey and the United States flew their nationals home. By the next day, two more passengers — a French woman and an American — had tested positive after arriving in their home countries.
Multiple governments are monitoring and, in many cases, quarantining the repatriated travelers. Health authorities in South Africa, Switzerland, France, the U.K., the Netherlands, Singapore and elsewhere are tracing contacts of anyone who left the ship earlier or interacted with passengers at airports and connecting flights. The evacuation of travelers from more than 20 countries was due to be completed soon, officials said, while public health agencies cautioned that identifying potential secondary cases will take weeks.