Seventeen Americans and British Citizen Arrive in U.S. After MV Hondius Hantavirus Tests Positive

Seventeen Americans and a British citizen evacuated from the MV Hondius after a deadly hantavirus outbreak arrived in the U.S. early Monday, with one American beginning to show symptoms and another “tested mildly PCR positive for the Andes virus,” according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The passengers landed at Eppley Airfield in Omaha and were taken by convoy, ambulance and multiple buses to the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where the medical center said the passenger who tested positive was “managed separately from other passengers during transport using appropriate biocontainment measures.”

Al Jazeera

The operation followed a repatriation flight in which France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said all five passengers “were immediately placed in strict isolation until further notice,” after a citizen of that country began showing symptoms.

The outbreak aboard the Dutch-flagged ship, MV Hondius, had involved nine confirmed or suspected cases linked to the ship, including three fatalities: a Dutch couple and a German woman, as the U.S. and French updates continued into Monday.

In France, Health Minister Stéphanie Rist said a French woman evacuated from the MV Hondius tested positive and that “Unfortunately, her symptoms worsened overnight,” as she was treated in a specialised infectious diseases unit in Paris.

Rist told France Inter radio that the woman started to feel very unwell on Sunday night and “tests came back positive,” while the BBC reported that 22 contacts were traced in France.

Al Jazeera

The U.S. update described one American passenger on the repatriation flight who tested “mildly positive” for the virus and another who had mild symptoms, with both traveling in the plane’s biocontainment units “out of an abundance of caution,” according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The World Health Organization recommends a 42-day quarantine and “active follow-up,” including daily checks for symptoms such as fever, as Spanish officials said passengers underwent health checks and had their temperatures taken when the ship arrived off Tenerife.

U.S. officials said the returning passengers would be placed under monitoring and clinical assessment, with the CDC sending a team of epidemiologists and medical professionals to the Canary Islands to “conduct an exposure risk assessment for each American passenger and provide recommendations for the level of monitoring required.”

“- Published An American and a French national who have returned to their home countries having left a cruise ship hit by a deadly outbreak of hantavirus have tested positive, authorities say”

BBC

Acting CDC Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told CNN’s “State of the Union” that “We don’t want to treat it like COVID,” framing the response around hantavirus protocols rather than a pandemic-style approach.

The Guardian reported that no vaccines or specific treatments exist for hantavirus, and that the Andes strain is the only variant capable of limited human-to-human transmission in close-contact settings, as governments continued repatriation operations described by Spanish authorities as “complex” and “unprecedented.”

As the ship prepared to depart for the Netherlands with about 30 crew members, the World Health Organization said the risk to the general public remained low, while the BBC reported that the WHO believed the person first infected in the outbreak died before he could be tested.