{"id":443940,"date":"2026-05-11T22:10:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T22:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/443940\/"},"modified":"2026-05-11T22:10:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T22:10:08","slug":"risk-of-further-hantavirus-cases-among-cruise-ship-evacuees-who-warns-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/443940\/","title":{"rendered":"Risk of further hantavirus cases among cruise ship evacuees, WHO warns \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

France<\/a>, Spain<\/a> and Greece<\/a> have placed people who disembarked from a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus<\/a> outbreak into quarantine in hospital as further passengers tested positive for the rare but serious infection.<\/p>\n

One Spaniard who is quarantining \u200cin Madrid after being rescued from the vessel has tested positive \u200bfor hantavirus, the health \u2060ministry said on Monday.<\/p>\n

The \u200cremaining \u200c13 \u200bSpaniards quarantining at the same \u2060military hospital \u200btested negative \u200bfor the virus, \u200cthe ministry said. The patient \u2060presented \u2060no symptoms \u200band was in a good condition, the ministry said.<\/p>\n

A French woman who tested positive for hantavirus after she was taken off the ship reported symptoms to doctors onboard, but was told it was probably just anxiety, the Spanish health minister has said.<\/p>\n

Javier Padilla Bern\u00e1ldez said the woman had been suffering flu-like symptoms but they appeared to be getting better and she did not have a fever. The World Health Organisation<\/a> (WHO) later said the woman was in a \u201cvery critical\u201d condition.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Two Irish passengers from hantavirus-hit cruise ship return home<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The MV Hondius left the dock in the Canary Island of Tenerife on Monday evening, after 120 people from 23 nations were repatriated over 48 hours in an operation described by Spanish authorities as \u201ccomplex\u201d and \u201cunprecedented\u201d. Twenty-six crew and two health workers remained on the ship as it headed to Rotterdam in the Netherlands<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Despite the deaths of three people who had been onboard the ship, and eight other confirmed cases, doctors from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the Spanish foreign health service assessed the French woman and dismissed her symptoms as anxiety or stress, Padilla said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were not thinking that these symptoms were compatible with hantavirus. Why? Because what she was telling [them] was [that she had] an episode of coughing some days ago that had disappeared, and what she was having at that moment was kind of like stress or anxiety or nervousness. So it was not catalogued [as hantavirus],\u201d Padilla said.<\/p>\n

In France, the government there issued a decree stating that all those deemed to be contact cases would be placed in health facilities for assessment for 72 hours, before being \u201ckept in quarantine or placed in isolation for a total duration of 42 days\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur public health response is clear: all contacts, without exception, must undergo strict quarantine in a hospital setting,\u201d prime minister S\u00e9bastien Lecornu said. <\/p>\n

Contract tracing has identified 22 people so far in France who were on the cruise ship or who travelled on planes with people who turned out to be infected.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Dutch-flagged MV Hondius cruise ship. Photograph: Jorge Guerrero\/Getty <\/p>\n

It came as a French woman who had been evacuated from the cruise ship this weekend and was placed in quarantine in a Paris hospital specialising in infectious disease tested positive for hantavirus.<\/p>\n

She began to feel seriously unwell on Sunday and was now in intensive care in a \u201cstable condition\u201d, Lecornu said. <\/p>\n

Twelve other French citizens are undergoing quarantine in hospital, while a further group of 14 passengers who were on a flight from Johannesburg to Amsterdam with a woman who later died of the virus have been contacted by health authorities.<\/p>\n

United States authorities said that one evacuated passenger had tested \u201cmildly positive\u201d and another had \u201cmild symptoms\u201d. All 17 repatriated US citizens are to \u201cundergo clinical assessment and receive appropriate care and support based on their condition\u201d.<\/p>\n

The WHO has warned that additional cases may emerge among evacuated passengers because hantavirus has a very long incubation period, meaning it can take up to eight weeks after exposure for symptoms to appear.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe risk seeing new cases in the coming days or weeks,\u201d said Olivier le Polain, an epidemiologist at the WHO, during a press briefing.<\/p>\n

Because the disease has a long incubation period, authorities are recommending long quarantine periods to ensure no further chain of infection.<\/p>\n

In Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom evacuated passengers are allowed to return home but must remain in isolation for 42-45 days. Belgian and British authorities said that they would be monitored closely by health workers.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Jennifer O’Connell: If MV Hondius isn\u2019t the start of a hantavirus pandemic, it might prove the end of something elseOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Greek authorities said that the one Greek national who was aboard would be kept in quarantine at the Attikon General University Hospital of Athens for 45 days.<\/p>\n

In total the outbreak has infected nine people, three of whom have died, according to the WHO, with laboratory tests identifying the infections as the Andes strain of the virus.<\/p>\n

Health officials have stressed that hantavirus spreads with much greater difficulty than infections like flu, with infection spreading through prolonged close contact rather than casual exposure.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have been repeating the same answer many times,\u201d WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. \u201cThis is not another Covid. And the risk to the public is low. So they shouldn\u2019t be scared, and they shouldn\u2019t panic.\u201d \u2013 Additional reporting: Reuters and The Guardian.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"France, Spain and Greece have placed people who disembarked from a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":443941,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[1814,2917,188479,103,61,60,5151,2846,115,31614],"class_list":["post-443940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-france","tag-greece","tag-hantavirus","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-netherlands","tag-spain","tag-united-states","tag-world-health-organisation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443940\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/443941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}