Spanish authorities are preparing to receive more than 140 passengers and crew from a cruise ship stricken by hantavirus, which is en route to the Canary Islands, and health officials said they will carry out careful evacuations.
The ship is expected to reach the Spanish island of Tenerife, off the coast of West Africa, on Saturday or Sunday.
"They will reach a completely isolated area," Virginia Bracones, the head of Spain's emergency services, said yesterday.
The MV Hondius cruise ship sails under the Dutch flag and Dutch officials said today that they are also in close contact with the ship's owner and the authorities of the countries whose citizens are on board.
The United States (US) has agreed to send a plane to the Canary Islands to repatriate 17 of its citizens from the cruise ship, she said.
The British government also said it would charter a plane to evacuate more than twenty British nationals on the ship.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said today that three people have died from the infection and eight have been infected, and that five of those eight cases have been laboratory-confirmed as hantavirus. The WHO said the risk of widespread public transmission is low.
Hantavirus is usually spread by inhaling contaminated rodent feces and is not easily transmitted between people. Symptoms usually appear between one and eight weeks after exposure to the virus.
So far, none of the remaining passengers and crew members on board are showing symptoms of infection, the cruise company Oceanwide Expeditions, which is headquartered in the Netherlands, announced yesterday.
Health authorities on four continents are continuing to identify passengers who disembarked the ship before the deadly infection was detected, and are also trying to find people who may have come into contact with them since then.
Nearly two weeks after the first passenger died on the ship on April 24, more than 20 people from at least 12 countries have left the ship without tracing their contacts, the operator and Dutch officials said yesterday.
The WHO confirmed today that a flight attendant on a plane that briefly carried an infected cruise ship passenger in South Africa tested negative for hantavirus.
The flight attendant was working on a flight from Johannesburg to Amsterdam on April 25 and later fell ill. She was taken to an isolation ward at a hospital in Amsterdam yesterday. A cruise ship passenger, a Dutch woman whose husband died on board, was briefly on the plane but was taken off because she was too ill to travel on an international flight to Europe. She later died in Johannesburg.
The Dutch public health service is currently tracing the contacts of passengers on that flight who were in contact with the sick woman before she left the plane.
British health authorities have announced that a third British citizen is suspected of being infected with hantavirus. The person is on one of the islands of Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory in the South Atlantic where a ship stopped in April.
Two other Britons who were on the ship have been confirmed to have the virus. One is in hospital in the Netherlands and the other in South Africa.
Authorities in South Africa are also trying to trace the contacts of any passengers who had previously disembarked the ship. They are mainly focusing on the April 25 flight from the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena to Johannesburg, the day after the passengers disembarked.
DON'T MISS IT
See more:
Download the app and follow the news
FOLLOW US ON
