Health experts mobilized quickly to prevent a possible spread of the hantavirus after two suspected cases appeared on Friday not far from the luxury cruise ship where the outbreak broke out, reports Reuters.
The most recent cases are a man who got sick after getting off the ship and a woman who got sick after sitting next to an infected passenger on a plane.
The cases reported by health authorities many thousands of kilometers apart — one in Spain, the other on the world's most isolated inhabited island — Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic.
They are not included in the World Health Organization's tally, which includes eight people who fell ill aboard the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius.
Three of these people died. WHO officials said on Friday that six of the eight suspected cases had been confirmed as hantavirus, a potentially fatal disease usually transmitted and spread by rodents.
WHO: “The risk to the population is low”
Announcements of new cases far from the ship fueled concern about a wider spread of the virus, although WHO officials have repeatedly said the risk to the general public is not high and the virus is not easily transmitted.
“Based on the dynamics of this outbreak, how it is spreading and not spreading among the people on the ship as well as among those who disembarked, we continue to consider the risk to the general population to be low,” Anais Legand, WHO's technical lead for viral threats, told an online news conference.
Tests have determined that the outbreak on the Hondius ship, the first of its kind documented on a ship, involves the Andes variant, the only species of hantavirus known to be capable of limited human-to-human transmission through close and prolonged contact, according to the WHO.
The UN health body estimates the death rate among infected people in the United States to be as high as 50 percent.
The Hondius ship will arrive in the Canaries on Sunday
The ship was carrying 147 passengers and crew when an outbreak of severe respiratory illness among passengers was first reported to the WHO last Sunday.
By then, another 34 passengers had left the ship, which left Argentina in March with stops in Antarctica and other locations before heading north to the waters off Cape Verde, west of Africa. The ship was detained there briefly this week after news of the outbreak broke.
As of Friday, four patients were still hospitalized in South Africa, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
Oceanwide, the cruise operator, said on Thursday that there are no more people with symptoms of possible infection on board the ship.
The Hondius is en route to Tenerife in the Canary Islands and was expected to dock there on Sunday morning.
Arriving passengers and crew members will be screened before disembarkation, according to guidelines that are still being finalized by the WHO and other health agencies.
