Two Irish passengers on board virus-hit cruise ship<\/a> <\/b>
Timeline of events on board MV Hondius<\/a>
What is hantavirus and how deadly is it?<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n
There are no specific drugs to treat the disease, so treatment focuses on supportive care, including putting patients on ventilators in severe cases.<\/p>\n
WHO said the risk to the wider public was low and there was no need \u200cfor panic or travel restrictions.<\/p>\n
However, authorities in the island nation \u2060of Cape Verde said they had not allowed Dutch-flagged MV Hondius to dock as a precaution.<\/p>\n
‘A lot of uncertainty’<\/b><\/p>\n
“We’re not just headlines: we’re people with families, with lives, with people waiting for us at home,” Jake Rosmarin, a US travel blogger, said in a tearful Instagram video post from the ship yesterday.<\/p>\n
“There is a lot of uncertainty and that is the hardest part,” he added.<\/p>\n
\n
A spokesperson for the ship’s Netherlands-based operator, Oceanwide Expeditions, said that, as a precaution, all passengers were instructed to remain inside their cabins to prevent any potential spread \u200cof the virus.<\/p>\n
Although human-to-human transmission is rare, the incubation period can last several weeks, meaning some people may not yet be showing symptoms.<\/p>\n
Oceanwide Expeditions was trying to arrange the repatriation of two crew members with symptoms of the disease – one British and one Dutch – along with the body of the German national and \u2060a “guest closely associated with the deceased” who does not have symptoms.<\/p>\n
The company said it was looking into whether passengers could be screened and disembarked on the Canary Islands of Las Palmas and Tenerife.<\/p>\n
Spanish authorities said \u200cthey had not yet received a request for the ship to dock and disembark passengers there.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/00245054-614.jpg\"\/)
\nCape Verde said it had not allowed Dutch-flagged MV Hondius to dock as a precaution<\/p>\n
The Hondius left Ushuaia in southern Argentina in March, according to company documentation, on a voyage marketed as an Antarctic nature expedition, with berth prices ranging from \u20ac14,000 to \u20ac22,000.<\/p>\n
It travelled past mainland Antarctica, the Falklands, South Georgia, Nightingale Island, Tristan, St Helena, and Ascension before reaching Cape Verdean waters on 3 May.<\/p>\n
South Africa’s Health Department confirmed two of the deceased were Dutch nationals: a 70-year-old man, who died on St Helena on 11 April, and \u2060his wife, 69, who died in South Africa after collapsing at OR Tambo International Airport.<\/p>\n
The British man being treated in a private clinic in Johannesburg became ill on 27 April, while the German passenger died \u2060on 2 May, Oceanwide Expeditions said.<\/p>\n
Source not yet clear<\/b><\/p>\n
Hantavirus usually begins with flu-like symptoms, such as fatigue and fever, one to eight weeks after exposure. A spokesperson for the RIVM said the source of the outbreak was unclear.<\/p>\n
“You could imagine, for example, that rats on board the ship transmitted the virus,” he said.<\/p>\n
“But another possibility is that during a stop somewhere in South America, people were infected, for instance via mice, and became ill that way,” he added.<\/p>\n
Daniel Bausch, a visiting professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland, said there was some evidence of human-to-human transmission in the Andes Virus, a species of hantavirus found in Argentina and Chile.<\/p>\n
“So it’s significant that this cruise ship started its journey in Argentina,” he said.<\/p>\n
“The good news is this is not going to be a big outbreak,” he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The World Health Organization \u2060said that two cases of hantavirus have been confirmed with five more suspected after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":468790,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-469207","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-featured-news","11":"tag-featurednews","12":"tag-headlines","13":"tag-latest-news","14":"tag-latestnews","15":"tag-main-news","16":"tag-mainnews","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-top-stories","19":"tag-topstories","20":"tag-world","21":"tag-world-news","22":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/468790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}