Virus-hit cruise ship heads for Spain as evacuees land in Europe
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A Bombardier Challenger 605 medical aircraft landing at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on May 6, allegedly carrying passengers from the cruise ship MV Hondius.
PHOTO: AFP
- Hantavirus outbreak on MV Hondius cruise ship killed three; patients were evacuated via medical flights to Netherlands and Spain.
- Experts confirmed the rare Andes hantavirus, transmissible human-to-human; WHO states global outbreak risk is low, unlike COVID-19.
- Officials are tracing contacts from commercial flights used by symptomatic deceased patients. MV Hondius will dock in Tenerife for repatriation.
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MADRID - A cruise ship hit by a deadly hantavirus outbreak will reach the Spanish island of Tenerife “within three days”, with the evacuation of passengers to start from May 11, Spain said on May 6.
The fate of the MV Hondius sparked international alarm after three people travelling on the ship died, though World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus insisted the outbreak was not comparable to the Covid pandemic.
One passenger, Ruhi Cenet, a 35-year-old Turkish travel vlogger, said what started out as an idyllic voyage turned chaotic when the ship’s captain announced on April 12 that a passenger had died.
“He said it was due to natural causes,” Mr Cenet told AFP.
“They didn’t even consider the possibility of having such a contagious disease,” he added. “They didn’t take the problem seriously enough.”
The WHO said emergency crews evacuated three people – two sick crew members and another person who had been in contact with one of the confirmed cases – from the ship, which later left its anchorage off Cape Verde and headed for Spain’s Canary Islands.
After being taken from the ship to an ambulance boat by medical personnel in hazmat suits, the three evacuees later boarded flights at the airport in Cape Verde’s capital Praia.
One of the medical planes landed in Amsterdam Airport at 1747 GMT, according to AFP reporters at the scene.
German emergency services said they had picked up one evacuee in Amsterdam who came into contact with an infected person on board the ship, and were transporting the individual to a hospital in Dusseldorf.
Another landed at Las Palmas in Spain’s Canary Islands earlier on May 6 afternoon, an AFP journalist there saw.
Spanish officials said that plane was carrying two patients and had landed for technical reasons. Spain’s health ministry said the patients would need a new plane to travel on to the Netherlands.
Low global risk: WHO
Experts confirmed the version of the virus detected aboard the Hondius was a rare strain known as the Andes virus, the only one that can be transmitted between humans.
The first person to have the virus on the ship could not have been infected during the cruise, given the one- to six-week incubation period, WHO expert Anais Legand told AFP.
The ship left Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1, and the first death occurred on April 11.
Argentine officials said the first couple killed had visited Chile, Uruguay and Argentina before the cruise.
They said experts would travel to Ushuaia to test rodents there for hantavirus.
Argentina has seen an increase in hantavirus cases, but not an outbreak, expert Raul Gonzalez Ittig told AFP.
Health officials played down fears of a wider global outbreak from the virus, which is less contagious than Covid-19.
UN health agency chief Tedros told AFP it was not like the Covid-19 pandemic, adding: “The risk to the rest of the world is low.”
The ship has been at the centre of an international health scare since May 2, when the WHO was informed that three passengers had died and the suspected cause was hantavirus.
The rare respiratory disease is usually spread from infected rodents, typically through urine, droppings and saliva.
The Hondius set sail from Ushuaia in Argentina on April 1 and passengers began falling ill a month ago.
A Dutch man died on board on April 11, and his wife, who left the ship to accompany his body to South Africa, died there 15 days later after also falling ill.
Two other people are still being treated – one in Johannesburg and one in the Swiss city of Zurich.
Spanish Health Minister Monica Garcia Gomez said the vessel would dock within the next three days in Tenerife, in the Canaries, and all foreign passengers would be flown back to their home countries from there if their health allowed.
The Dutch woman who died had flown on a commercial plane from the island of Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic Ocean, to Johannesburg while she was showing symptoms.
Officials were trying to trace people on that flight, which South African-based carrier Airlink said was carrying 82 passengers and six crew.
Fuelling fears of further contact, Dutch airline KLM said on May 6 that one of the people who died from the virus had been “briefly” on its flight from Johannesburg to the Netherlands on April 25, but was removed before take-off.
The cruise ship originally counted 88 passengers and 59 crew, with 23 nationalities on board. AFP
