Passengers from hantavirus-hit cruise ship disembarking in Canary Islands | Health News

The cruise ship hit by a deadly hantavirus outbreak has arrived near the Port of Granadilla in Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and Spain has begun the process of disembarking passengers.

The Dutch-flagged MV Hondius arrived at the Spanish port early on Sunday, escorted by a Civil Guard vessel, according to data from the maritime tracking service VesselFinder.

The ship had left for Tenerife on Wednesday from the coast of Cape Verde after the World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Union asked Spain to manage the evacuation of its passengers following the detection of the hantavirus outbreak.

The WHO said on Friday that at least eight people on the ship had fallen ill, including three who died – a Dutch couple and a German national. Six of these people are confirmed to have contracted the virus, with another two suspected cases, the WHO said.

All passengers on the luxury cruise ship are being considered high-risk contacts as a precautionary measure, Europe’s public health agency said late on Saturday as part of its rapid scientific advice.

A report published by the Spanish Ministry of Health before the ship arrived in Tenerife confirmed that it had successfully passed the required health checks before dropping anchor.

“According to information provided by experts who boarded the ship, hygiene and environmental conditions are appropriate and they did not detect any rodents; transmission through contact with rodents on board is therefore unlikely,” the report reads.

Just before midday on Sunday, Spanish health officials boarded the ship to conduct a final check and begin evacuating passengers, the Health Ministry said.

The first group of passengers, all Spanish nationals, then began to disembark into a small boat from the cruise ship.

They will be transported from the port in military buses to the airport and evacuated by a Spanish government plane to Madrid, where they will be taken to hospital and quarantined, officials have said.

Dutch passengers will be the next group to leave the ship, and their plane will also carry passengers from Germany, Belgium and Greece, Spanish Health Minister Monica Garcia said on Sunday.

Passengers arriving from Turkiye, France, the United Kingdom and the United States will then be evacuated, she added, speaking to the press in the port of Tenerife.

“The last flight for this operation is leaving from Australia … It is the most complex flight and is scheduled to arrive tomorrow afternoon,” Garcia said, adding that this flight will allow the evacuation of six people from Australia, New Zealand and other Asian countries.

Thirty crew members will remain on board and will sail to the Netherlands, where the ship will be disinfected.

‘Not another COVID’

Hantavirus is usually spread by rodents, but in rare cases, it can be transmitted person to person.

The WHO estimates that there are between 10,000 and 100,000 cases of hantavirus infection each year. Argentina remains the country with the highest number of cases in the Americas, the WHO indicated in December, with a case fatality rate of approximately 32 percent, higher than the average observed for other strains of the virus.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Saturday evening arrived in Tenerife with Spain’s interior and health ministers and its minister for territorial policy to coordinate the arrival of the ship.

Thanking Tenerife residents for their solidarity, Tedros assured them that the risk to them from the ship was low.

“I need you to hear me clearly,” he wrote in an open letter to the people of Tenerife. “This is not another COVID.”

WHO’s epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention director, Maria Van Kerkhove, said that while everybody on board will be classified as “a high-risk contact”, the risk to the general public and the people of the Canaries remained low.

In the city of Granadilla de Abona, early on Sunday, life appeared largely normal. Some people were swimming, others shopping at the market or sitting at cafe terraces.

“There are worries there could be a danger, but honestly, I don’t see people being very concerned,” David Parada, a lottery vendor, told the AFP news agency.

Tracking and tracing around the world

The MV Hondius left Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1 for a cruise across the Atlantic Ocean to Cape Verde.

Argentinian provincial health official Juan Petrina said there was an “almost zero chance” the Dutch man linked to the outbreak contracted the disease in Ushuaia based on the virus’s incubation period, among other factors.

Countries such as Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, the US, the UK and the Netherlands confirmed on Saturday that they had sent planes to evacuate their nationals from the ship.

Not all the planes had yet arrived on site, the Canary Islands authorities said on Sunday morning.

However, health authorities in many of these countries have been tracking passengers who had already disembarked and anyone who may have come into contact with them.

France is closely monitoring the situation.

In a statement, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Health stressed on Sunday that the authorities were closely monitoring the situation.

Meanwhile, a flight attendant on the Dutch airline KLM, who came into contact with an infected passenger from the cruise ship and later showed mild symptoms, tested negative for the hantavirus, the WHO said on Friday.

The passenger, the wife of the first person to die in the outbreak, had briefly been on a plane bound from Johannesburg to the Netherlands on April 25 but was removed before takeoff. She died the following day in a Johannesburg hospital.

Spanish authorities said a woman on that flight was also being tested for the hantavirus after having developed symptoms at home in eastern Spain. She is in isolation in hospital, Secretary of State for Health Javier Padilla said.

Two Singapore residents who had been on the ship tested negative for the disease but will remain in quarantine, the city-state’s authorities said on Friday.

British health authorities also said on Friday that there was a suspected case on Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic, one of the world’s most isolated settlements with about 220 residents. The MV Hondius had stopped there on April 15.