View of a biohazard suit for staff of High-Level Isolation Unit of La Candelaria University Hospital in the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, in Tenerife, Canary Islands, southwestern Spain, Friday. Spanish authorities prepares for the arrival of cruise ship HV Hondius, affected by a hantavirus outbreak. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), eight cases of hantavirus have been reported, including three deaths, on the cruise ship that is expected to dock in the Canary Islands at the weekend. EPA-Yonhap
LONDON — As the cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak sails towards Tenerife, World Health Organization officials are racing to draw up step-by-step guidance for what should happen next for the nearly 150 passengers when they finally reach land on Sunday.
The hantavirus outbreak – which has killed three people among at least eight suspected or confirmed infections - is the first ever recorded on a cruise ship, so some new protocols are needed.
Half a dozen current and former WHO officials and hantavirus experts said the outbreak could be managed by adapting standard public health steps, like isolating sick passengers or those who may have been in contact with them. None of the passengers on the ship now have symptoms, the ship's operator has said.
Officials are also seeking tips from Argentina, where a previous outbreak of the Andes virus, the same strain as on the ship, was snuffed out in 2019.
“If we follow public health measures and the lessons we learned from Argentina ... we can break this chain of transmission. This doesn't need to be a large epidemic,” Abdi Rahman Mahamud, director of the WHO's alert and response coordination department, said. He said the focus was on isolation for sick people, and monitoring and quarantining for other passengers, subject to national government decisions.
The WHO may also recommend that some people with links to the outbreak take their temperature daily for at least 42 days as the Andes strain has a long incubation period, Anais Legand, WHO technical officer for viral threats, said at an online briefing on Friday.
National authorities may also be asked to set up regular contact with those people, and give them a phone number to call if they feel at all unwell, she added.
Passengers are being split into high-risk and low-risk contacts based on their interactions with sick travellers, the WHO said. Contact-tracing is also key for any who have left the ship already.
The Andes hantavirus is known to spread through close and prolonged contact, and chiefly when a patient is already symptomatic. That information is based largely on the one outbreak where the Andes virus spread between people in Argentina in 2018-19, in which 34 people were infected and 11 died.
Source: Korea Times News
