American health authorities have stepped up measures to contain a hantavirus outbreak linked to the MV Hondius cruise ship as US passengers aboard prepare to return home for quarantine monitoring, an American newspaper has reported.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that the vessel is scheduled to dock on Sunday in Tenerife, located in Spain’s Canary Islands, where personnel from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been deployed to support 17 American citizens on board.
According to the report, the US State Department is coordinating a repatriation flight for the affected passengers, who will later be moved to the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha for observation.
The MV Hondius, which has about 150 passengers and crew from 23 countries, departed Argentina and sailed across the Atlantic before a cluster of respiratory illnesses was reported while the ship was near Cape Verde off the coast of West Africa.
The CDC has designated the situation as a Level 3 emergency response, the agency’s lowest category of emergency activation.
World Health Organization (WHO) officials confirmed that the outbreak involves the Andes strain of hantavirus and has so far led to five confirmed infections, including three fatalities.
Scientists investigating the incident identified the rare Andes variant of hantavirus as the source of the outbreak. The strain is regarded as the only known form of the virus capable of spreading from person to person, typically through close contact.
The WHO disclosed that two passengers who later died had travelled through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay before boarding the cruise ship.
CDC officials stated that passengers would be monitored for approximately six weeks, in line with the virus’s incubation period. Health agencies in several US states are also tracing travelers who had disembarked from the vessel before the outbreak was officially confirmed.
