Health officials from Argentina’s various provinces met with national health authorities to coordinate epidemiological surveillance of hantavirus, following an outbreak of the disease on a cruise ship that departed from the country.
According to official sources, updated information on the outbreak detected on the MV Hondius was presented at Thursday’s (7) meeting, after the ship departed from the Argentine port of Ushuaia in the southern province of Tierra del Fuego. At the meeting, national authorities reported that, for now, it is not possible to confirm the source of the infection.
In any case, they indicated that testing conducted on one of the cruise passengers who entered South Africa identified the hantavirus variant as belonging to the Andes strain, which is present in the southern Argentine provinces of Chubut, Río Negro, and Neuquén, as well as in southern Chile.
“Currently, new studies are being conducted to determine its possible geographic origin and its relationship to other strains involved in person-to-person transmission,” the Argentine Ministry of Health stated in a press release.
At the meeting, information was also presented regarding the itinerary taken by the Dutch couple—who were the first to show symptoms of the disease and whose family members later died—through various regions of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay between late November and the time they boarded the cruise ship.
The Argentine Ministry of Health reiterated to the provinces the need to intensify epidemiological surveillance and to raise awareness among health teams to improve the identification and detection of cases presenting symptoms consistent with the disease, of which 42 cases of infection have been identified so far.
The hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius has already caused three deaths, and there are five other suspected cases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which considers the risk to the global population to be low.
The company that owns the ship and organized the cruise, Oceanwide Expeditions, reported on Thursday that “there are no symptomatic individuals on board” the Hondius, which departed late Wednesday afternoon from Cape Verde bound for the Canary Islands, specifically the port of Granadilla in Tenerife, a voyage expected to take between three and four days.
Hantaviruses are zoonotic viruses, characterized by their ability to infect rodents, and different species circulate in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Only a few of these species are associated with human infection, in which case they can cause severe illness.
Source: Lusa
