BUENOS AIRES — The provincial government of Tierra del Fuego pushed back forcefully Friday against the theory that a lethal hantavirus outbreak aboard an Antarctic cruise ship began in its main tourist port of Ushuaia, accusing federal health authorities of unfairly singling out the region and harming its vital cruise economy.
Provincial epidemiology director Juan Facundo Petrina told reporters that the nation’s Health Ministry had not contacted local officials before naming a Ushuaia landfill as the likely site where two Dutch tourists contracted the Andes variant of the virus. “I believe we are facing a smear campaign against this destination,” he said.
Petrina argued that the tourists — who both died after disembarking the ill‑fated Atlantic cruise — spent only two days in Tierra del Fuego during a four‑month journey across Argentina and Chile. That narrow window, he said, “dramatically reduces the likelihood that the infection happened here.” He also stressed that Tierra del Fuego has never recorded a case of hantavirus, including the Andes strain, unlike other Argentine provinces farther north.
Officials in Ushuaia, the remote southern city that serves as the main gateway to Antarctica, are acutely concerned about the outbreak’s effect on tourism. Last year the port received more than 157,000 cruise passengers — almost double the local population — and the sector has grown in importance as the province’s electronics‑manufacturing base has been hit by President Milei’s aggressive trade liberalization and subsidy cuts. “Now the whole world is associating Ushuaia, and cruise travel, with a lethal virus,” said Rubén Rafael, the former provincial health minister. “If this continues, reservations for next season are honestly going to plummet because nobody will want to be exposed.”
The federal Health Ministry has not altered its working theory. A ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation, said the government still considers Ushuaia the most likely infection site and that investigators were being dispatched only to Tierra del Fuego. But as of Friday evening, two days after the ministry announced it would send experts from the state‑backed Malbrán Institute to trap rats at the landfill, the team had not arrived. The official dismissed the delay as normal bureaucratic lag. Petrina said it was taking time “to determine all the exact locations where trapping and analysis will take place.”
Others in the left‑leaning province tied the slow response to the broader dismantling of Argentina’s public‑health infrastructure under Milei. Weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the World Health Organization, Milei followed suit and slashed funding for programs that track infectious diseases. Rafael, the former health minister, said the system is now “weakened, and as a result, the response to this outbreak has been very slow. That exposes all of us.”
Outside Argentina, public health specialists stress that the investigation is an urgent step to rule out local transmission of the Andes virus — the only hantavirus known to spread from person to person in rare cases. Celine Gounder, an epidemiologist and editor‑at‑large for KFF Health News who previously advised the Biden administration on the coronavirus pandemic, said the data‑gathering cannot wait. “If there is an Andes virus that is more infectious locally you’d want to know that so that you can warn local residents and take measures to prevent their infection,” she said. “And if they haven’t started that process yet, that would be concerning.”
The Dutch couple, aged 70 and 69, arrived in Argentina last November and spent weeks traveling by car before crossing between Argentina and Chile multiple times. They also visited Uruguay in March and boarded the Antarctic cruise from Ushuaia on April 1. The governments of Chile and Uruguay have both declared that the couple could not have been infected on their soil based on the virus’s up‑to‑eight‑week incubation period, though neither offered detailed evidence. Argentine officials acknowledge that because the couple died, retracing their full route is exceedingly difficult.
Several independent epidemiologists in Argentina contend that the outbreak most likely originated in the woodlands of central Patagonia, a popular tourist region where health authorities have documented hantavirus cases and where long‑tailed rats that carry the Andes variant are endemic — conditions that are absent in Ushuaia. Raúl González Ittig, a genetics professor at the National University of Córdoba, suggested that the federal government’s focus on Tierra del Fuego may be driven by media pressure. “With the media pressure now, it wouldn’t surprise me if the government’s response has been more about quieting criticism by appearing to act,” he said.