U.S. Monitors American Passengers from Hantavirus-Infected Cruise Ship
Eighteen American passengers from the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship, MV Hondius, arrived back in the United States on Monday. Two of these passengers have been placed in biocontainment units in Omaha, Nebraska, and Atlanta for monitoring. This unprecedented cruise ship outbreak has resulted in three fatalities and multiple infections during an Atlantic voyage from Argentina.
The cruise ship docked in Spain’s Canary Islands on Sunday, following the World Health Organization’s report of the outbreak on May 2. Health officials transported the majority of the American passengers to the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Here, 15 patients are in the quarantine unit, while one is in the biocontainment unit. As a contingency measure, two additional passengers were taken to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.
The CDC has classified its hantavirus response as Level 3, which is its lowest level of emergency. At a news conference on Monday, Dr. Brendan Jackson, the CDC’s acting director of high-consequence pathogens, emphasized that officials are being “very liberal” with symptom descriptions. He further stated that having symptoms doesn’t necessarily mean a patient has contracted hantavirus. The virus, which typically requires very close contact and symptoms for transmission, may have passed from human to human aboard the ship. This is a rare occurrence that health authorities continue to investigate across multiple continents.
Source: NBC News