Hantavirus is suspected of spreading aboard a luxury cruise ship, killing three passengers and sparking new concerns as a once obscure disease, with an extraordinarily high death rate, rises amid changing climate conditions.<\/p>\n
Officials are still trying to determine what happened aboard the ship, which commands fares of up to $28,845 for a 46-day journey that includes a tour of the Antarctica Peninsula and stops in Tierra del Fuego on the southern edge of Argentina. <\/p>\n
In addition to the three deaths, a fourth passenger was evacuated to a South African hospital and was in intensive care, and two crew members fell ill. The Dutch-flagged ship remained off the coast of Cape Verde, an island nation about 400 miles west of Senegal, where it was scheduled to have docked Monday. <\/p>\n
Among the possibilities that could explain the suspected outbreak, according to Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a UC San Francisco infectious diseases expert, are rodents getting on board the ship and exposing people to the virus, or person-to-person transmission. <\/p>\n
\u201cCould a cruise member have been cleaning up an area and incidentally aerosolized some rodent droppings?\u201d said Dr. Elizabeth Hudson, regional chief of infectious diseases at Kaiser Permanente Southern California. \u201cWas there a shore excursion that the passengers and crew attended where they were exposed to aerosolized rodent droppings?\u201d<\/p>\n
Because hantavirus is so rare, it\u2019s hard to say what effect these deaths might have on the cruise industry. COVID-19 hit the industry hard, but that was a global pandemic with a virus spreading rapidly with human-to-human contact. A key question for investigators is how the virus spread.<\/p>\n
Hantavirus is fairly rare in the Americas, but its high case fatality rate makes it a disease of major public health concern, the World Health Organization says. Hantavirus is more common in Asia and Europe, where the strains that circulate are less deadly, with a case fatality rate that ranges from less than 1% to 15%.<\/p>\n
Hantavirus is most commonly spread by inhaling particles contaminated with the virus \u2014 such as dried mouse urine, saliva or droppings. <\/p>\n
But there is one strain of hantavirus \u2014 known as the Andes virus \u2014 that can be transmitted from human to human, and has been transmitted in Argentina.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s unclear what strain of hantavirus hit the ship.<\/p>\n
The first death on the ship occurred April 11 somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and the man\u2019s cause of death couldn\u2019t be determined on board, the ship operator said. The body was transported off the ship April 24 as the vessel docked on Saint Helena Island, about 1,100 miles off Africa, and the man\u2019s wife accompanied his remains. <\/p>\n
The wife became unwell on the trip home and later died. The cruise ship operator was notified of the woman\u2019s death April 27. The couple were Dutch nationals. On the same day, another passenger, a British national, became seriously ill on the ship and was medically evacuated to South Africa. That patient was confirmed to have hantavirus. <\/p>\n
A German passenger died aboard the ship Saturday. And on Monday, the ship operator said two crew members \u2014 one British, one Dutch \u2014 had acute respiratory symptoms, one mild and one severe but both requiring urgent medical care. <\/p>\n
The MV Hondius is operated by Oceanwide Expeditions, which has a fleet of four ships and bills itself as a cruise ship eco-tour operator with trips to the Arctic and Antarctica. The MV Hondius can hold 170 passengers in 80 cabins.<\/p>\n
As of Monday, there were 148 people on board, including 17 U.S. passengers. One deceased passenger remained on board. <\/p>\n
The strains of hantavirus in the Americas are attracted to the small blood vessels of the lungs and make the blood vessels leaky \u2014 which is bad, because the lungs need air, Chin-Hong said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo people can\u2019t breathe,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like you\u2019re drowning. The lungs are leaky, so the fluid fills up in the lungs.\u201d <\/p>\n
There are 50 species of hantavirus. The virus that\u2019s found in the Americas tends to cause a cardiopulmonary syndrome, a condition that affects both the heart and the lungs, said Dr. Gaby Frank, director of Johns Hopkins Special Pathogens Center. <\/p>\n
Hantavirus is associated with a case fatality rate of up to 50% in the Americas. It was the cause of death of Gene Hackman\u2019s 65-year-old wife, Betsy Arakawa<\/a>, in their Santa Fe, N.M., home. Arakawa died days before Hackman, 95, died as a result of heart disease. There were signs of rodent entry in some structures on the couple\u2019s property. Last year, three people in Mammoth Lakes<\/a> died after contracting hantavirus. There was evidence of mice where all three of the deceased had worked, and one person had numerous mice in their home, according to the public health office for Mono County, home to Mammoth Lakes.<\/p>\n There is no vaccine or specific antiviral medicine for hantavirus. In the Americas, doctors can help infected people by putting them on a life-support machine known as ECMO, for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, which breathes for the patient by oxygenating the blood. \u201cIt\u2019s very, very intensive, and that\u2019s why the fatality rate is so high,\u201d Chin-Hong said. <\/p>\n Some experts expect hantavirus to be more of a concern in the future in some parts of the world due to climate change as rising temperatures are favorable to animals and insects that carry diseases, such as the increase in Lyme disease as the climate becomes more hospitable to the ticks that transmit it.<\/p>\n With rainfall patterns changing as global temperatures warm, \u201cthen you would expect that the rodent population will increase with time,\u201d Chin-Hong said. Examples include people being sickened with, and dying from, rat-borne diseases such as leptospirosis after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017. <\/p>\n In the U.S., there\u2019s an average of 30 hantavirus cases reported a year, a figure that has remained relatively steady. But \u201cthere has been more media attention to it,\u201d Hudson said.<\/p>\n Times staff writer Karen Garcia contributed to this report. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hantavirus is suspected of spreading aboard a luxury cruise ship, killing three passengers and sparking new concerns as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24675,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1173,8444,7245,15102,2070,14805,8,1742,15099,9,298,415,7074,9800,15100,15101,7,1672],"class_list":{"0":"post-24674","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-top-stories","8":"tag-americas","9":"tag-argentina","10":"tag-board","11":"tag-chin-hong","12":"tag-death","13":"tag-hantavirus","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-home","16":"tag-lung","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-passenger","19":"tag-people","20":"tag-same-day","21":"tag-ship","22":"tag-ship-operator","23":"tag-strain","24":"tag-top-stories","25":"tag-virus"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/116520490272721584","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24674\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}