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 Organization’s 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, based on how it is spreading and not spreading amongst the people on the ship, the people who have disembarked, as well, we continue to consider the risk as low for the general population,” Anais Legand, WHO technical officer for viral threats, 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.
