By Burnett Munthali
Health experts are racing to contain a potential spread of hantavirus as two new suspected cases emerged on Friday, far from the luxury cruise liner where the outbreak started.
The latest reports involved a man who fell ill after leaving the ship and a woman who became sick after sitting near an infected cruise passenger on a plane.
The occurrences reported by health officials thousands of miles apart — one in Spain, the other on the remote South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha — are separate from the World Health Organization’s tally of eight people who became ill aboard the Dutch-flagged ship MV Hondius.
Three of those people have died, and WHO officials said on Friday six of the eight suspected cases have been confirmed as hantavirus, a potentially fatal disease typically carried and spread by rodents.
The MV Hondius was en route on Friday to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and was expected to dock there early on Sunday, with arriving passengers and crew to be screened before disembarking under guidelines still being finalised by the WHO and other health agencies.
The World Health Organization has repeatedly said the risk to the wider public is low and the virus does not transmit easily.
The CDC has classified the hantavirus outbreak as a “level 3” emergency response, the lowest level of emergency activation.
Other experts have stressed the low probability of a widespread contagion, but the outbreak has put authorities on high alert as they urge all who have been in contact with passengers who left the Hondius to watch out for possible symptoms.
