MADRID — Spanish authorities are preparing to receive more than 140 passengers and crew from the MV Hondius, a Dutch-flagged cruise ship where a hantavirus outbreak has killed at least three people.
The vessel is expected to arrive at the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands on Saturday or Sunday. Spain’s head of emergency services, Virginia Barcones, said evacuees will be brought to a “completely isolated, cordoned-off area” as officials carry out careful transfers and medical checks.
Dutch officials said they remain in close contact with the ship’s owner and with the authorities of countries whose citizens are on board. Oceanwide Expeditions, the Netherlands-based operator, said none of the remaining passengers or crew were symptomatic as of Thursday.
Several governments are arranging repatriation flights. Spain said the United States will send a plane to return its 17 citizens, and the British government plans to charter a plane for nearly two dozen U.K. nationals.
The World Health Organization has characterized the public risk as low. Hantavirus is typically transmitted when people inhale dust contaminated with infected rodent droppings and is not usually spread between people. Symptoms can appear one to eight weeks after exposure.
Health authorities across four continents have been tracing passengers who disembarked the Hondius before the outbreak was recognized. Officials said more than two dozen people from at least 12 countries left the ship on April 24 without contact tracing, nearly two weeks after the first passenger died on board. The WHO reports hantavirus was first confirmed in a passenger on May 2.
Investigations have followed several possible exposures. A KLM flight attendant who briefly encountered an infected cruise passenger on a Johannesburg-to-Amsterdam flight tested negative, the WHO said. The passenger, a Dutch woman whose husband died on the ship, was too ill to continue the flight and was removed in Johannesburg, where she later died. Dutch public health authorities are tracing anyone on the flight who might have had contact with her.
U.K. health officials said a third British national is suspected of having hantavirus and is on Tristan da Cunha, a remote British territory where the ship stopped in April. Two other Britons have tested positive: one is hospitalized in the Netherlands and another in South Africa. South African authorities are tracing contacts, focusing on an April 25 flight from St. Helena to Johannesburg taken by passengers after disembarking the vessel.
Officials say tracing and monitoring remain priorities as countries work to identify and isolate anyone who may have been exposed while limiting risk to the broader public.