A French passenger who contracted hantavirus during the multi-country outbreak aboard the MV Hondius is fighting for her life on advanced life support in a Paris hospital, her doctor said Tuesday, as the global case count tied to the cruise ship climbed to 11 with three fatalities.
Dr. Xavier Lescure, an infectious disease specialist at Bichat Hospital, said the woman has developed severe pulmonary and cardiac complications and is connected to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine that pumps blood through an artificial lung before returning it to her body. Lescure described the intervention as “the final stage of supportive care” and said the hope is that relieving pressure on the lungs and heart will allow them time to recover.
The World Health Organization has now confirmed nine hantavirus infections among passengers and crew, with two additional suspected cases awaiting confirmation. All three deaths involve passengers, including a Dutch couple that health authorities believe were the first exposed to the virus during a visit to South America. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday that there is “no indication we are seeing the start of a larger outbreak,” but he cautioned that the virus’s incubation period — one to eight weeks — means the situation could still evolve. “It is possible we will see more cases in the coming weeks,” Tedros added.
The most recent confirmed case is a Spanish passenger who tested positive after being evacuated from the ship and is now quarantined at a military hospital in Madrid, Spain’s Health Ministry announced.
The carefully orchestrated evacuation of 87 passengers and 35 crew members on the Spanish island of Tenerife concluded Monday night. Personnel in full-body protective suits and respirator masks transferred evacuees to flights; two aircraft carrying Dutch nationals, along with passengers from Australia and New Zealand and Filipino crew, landed overnight in Eindhoven, Netherlands, where all were placed under quarantine. The Hondius, with some crew still aboard, is now sailing to Rotterdam to undergo cleaning and disinfection, according to operator Oceanwide Expeditions.
Argentina is dispatching a team of scientific experts to investigate the outbreak’s origin. The Dutch couple believed to be the index cases spent several months in Argentina and neighboring countries before boarding the cruise. Argentine officials said the pair took a bird-watching tour that included a stop at a landfill where they could have been exposed to virus-carrying rodents. The health ministry’s team will examine the landfill and other sites visited by the couple, including areas known to host rat populations that carry the Andes variant of hantavirus, which was detected in this outbreak. Local authorities in the province from which the cruise departed have disputed the landfill theory.
Hantavirus typically spreads through rodent excreta and is not easily transmitted between people. However, the Andes variant can spread from person to person in rare instances. Symptoms — fever, chills, and muscle aches — usually appear one to eight weeks after exposure. There is no cure or vaccine, but WHO officials say early detection and treatment improve survival rates. Tedros has advised returning passengers to remain in quarantine for 42 days, though he noted that the WHO cannot enforce its recommendations and that countries may handle asymptomatic passengers differently.
In the Netherlands, the Radboud University Medical Center said Monday night that 12 staff members who treated a Hondius patient were placed in a six-week precautionary quarantine after the patient’s blood and urine were not handled according to stricter protocols. “The risk of infection is low,” the hospital said in a statement, but imposed the quarantine as a precaution. The patient had been evacuated from the ship on one of the flights that landed in the Netherlands last week and later tested positive for hantavirus.