AMSTERDAM, May 8 — Health experts raced to contain a potential spread of hantavirus as two suspected cases emerged on Friday far from the luxury cruise liner where the outbreak started.
The latest reports involved a man who fell ill after leaving the ship and a woman who became sick after sitting near an infected cruise passenger on a plane.
The occurrences reported by health officials thousands of miles apart — one in Spain, the other on the remote South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha — are separate from the World Health Organisation's (WHO) tally of eight people who became ill aboard the Dutch-flagged ship MV Hondius.
Three of those people have died. WHO officials said on Friday six of the eight suspected cases have been confirmed as hantavirus, a potentially fatal disease typically carried and spread by rodents.
The announcements of new cases far from the vessel fuelled concern about a wider spread of the virus, although WHO officials have repeatedly said the risk to the public at large is not high and the virus is not transmitted easily.
"Based on the dynamics of this outbreak, how it is spreading and not spreading amongst the people on the ship and those who have disembarked, we continue to consider the risk as low for the general population," WHO technical officer for viral threats Anais Legand said in an online briefing.
Testing has determined that the Hondius outbreak, the first of its kind documented on a ship, involves the Andes virus, the only hantavirus species known to be capable of limited transmission between humans, through close and prolonged contact, according to the WHO.
The United Nations (UN) health body puts the fatality rates among infected people in the United States at up to 50 per cent.
The ship was carrying 147 passengers and crew when a cluster of severe respiratory illnesses among passengers was first reported to the WHO on Sunday.
By then, 34 other passengers had departed the vessel, which first sailed from Argentina in March with stops in the Antarctic and other locations before heading north to waters off Cape Verde west of Africa. The vessel was briefly held there this week after news of the outbreak emerged.
Four patients remained hospitalised on Friday in South Africa, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
Oceanwide, the cruise operator, said on Thursday there were no people with symptoms of a possible infection remaining on the vessel.
The Hondius was en route on Friday to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and was expected to dock there early on Sunday. Arriving passengers and crew will be screened before disembarking under guidelines still being finalised by the WHO and other health agencies.
