PRAIA, Cape Verde (AP) — Three patients with suspected hantavirus infections were being evacuated froma cruise shipto the Netherlands on Wednesday, the U.N. health agency said, as the vessel at the center of adeadly outbreakremained off Cape Verde with nearly 150 people on board waiting to head to Spain’s Canary Islands.
Associated Press footage showed health workers in protective gear heading to the ship for the evacuation that included the ship’s British doctor, who Spain’s health ministry said had been in “serious condition” but has improved. An air ambulance later departed.
Three patients were evacuated from a cruise ship off Cape Verde on Wednesday amid a hantavirus outbreak, as a new case was confirmed in Switzerland.
Three people have died, and one body remained on the ship, theWorld Health Organizationsaid. Eight caseshave been recordedin all, three of them confirmed by laboratory testing. Hantavirus usually spreads by inhaling contaminated rodent droppings and can spread person-to-person, though the WHO calls that rare.
Contact tracing had begun on two continents, Europe and Africa, in search of infections around people who earlier left the ship, which departed over a month ago from South America for stops in Antarctica and several remote Atlantic islands.
Two Argentine officials investigating the origins of the outbreak said the government’s leading hypothesis is that a Dutch couple contracted the virus while bird-watching in the city of Ushuaia before boarding.
They said the couple visited a landfill during the tour and may have been exposed to rodents. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media, with the investigation ongoing. Authorities previously said Ushuaia and surrounding Tierra del Fuego province had never recorded a hantavirus case.
Helene Goessaert, a passenger of a cruise ship at the center of a rare-virus outbreak, says that the atmosphere on board the ship is ‘relatively good’.
The Dutch foreign ministry said the three people evacuated were a 41-year-old Dutch national, a 56-year-old British national and a 65-year-old German national who would be “immediately transferred to specialized hospitals in Europe.” A Dutch hospital confirmed it would take one. German authorities were preparing for a second.
Two remain in “serious condition,” Dutch ship operator Oceanwide Expeditions said, and the third had no symptoms but was “closely associated” with a German passenger who died on the MV Hondius ship on May 2.
Source: Drudge Report
