WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus shared on social media on June 16 that hantavirus infections still stand at 13, with deaths unchanged at 3. No fresh infections have popped up in the last three weeks, and it’s been over a month since we last saw a new death—pretty stable overall.
Back in early May, a cruise ship called the “Hondius” was sailing the Atlantic when it hit a rough patch—passengers started getting sick with acute respiratory disease from the hantavirus Andes strain.
This virus is native to Latin America and is the only type of hantavirus known to pass between humans, though it’s pretty limited. In past outbreaks, it spreads through close or long-term contact, like within families, among close partners, or between healthcare workers and patients.
The Andes virus can have an incubation period of up to six weeks. Tedros earlier stressed that while this is a serious outbreak, the WHO still sees the overall risk to the public as low.
At the same time, efforts to trace where the virus came from haven’t made any real progress.
The ship, registered in the Netherlands, set out from Ushuaia in southern Argentina on April 1, traveled past Antarctica, and was heading to the Canary Islands—a Spanish territory off Morocco’s coast.
On June 12, Argentina’s health ministry said a team from the National Laboratories and Health Institutes Administration Carlos Malbrán Institute and the U.S. CDC were in Mendoza province checking out the hantavirus. They set traps for rodents like long-tailed dwarf rice rats to see if the virus was spreading there, but came up empty. This further backs up the idea that the first infection on the ship didn’t happen in Argentina.
WHO thinks some passengers might have caught the virus before boarding, and they were told the ship had no rats.The health department of Tierra del Fuego, where Ushuaia is, said the province has never reported a hantavirus case.
Hantavirus infections happen worldwide, with about 200,000 cases a year globally. In the Americas, it’s 200-300 cases annually, and numbers are slowly ticking up. The current outbreak’s fatality rate is a scary 32.7%, way above the usual level.
To answer public concerns about the local outbreak, China’s CDC posted a科普 article on their official Weibo on May 8, titled “What is Hantavirus? How Does It Spread? How to Prevent It?”
The article explains that in China, hantavirus is known as “epidemic hemorrhagic fever.” It’s mainly carried by rodents and belongs to the Bunyaviridae family, Hantaviridae genus. Over 20 types can cause disease, with different symptoms ranging from hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome to hantavirus pulmonary syndrome.
Epidemic hemorrhagic fever is common in China, reported everywhere except Qinghai and Xinjiang. It mostly hits young male farmers and workers, but everyone’s susceptible. Severe cases can be deadly if not treated quickly.
On May 25, Tedros told a WHO executive board meeting that the hantavirus outbreak had stabilized, with only one new case in the past two weeks and no new deaths since May 2.
He also flagged that the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is spreading fast, urging WHO member states to hustle in the coming weeks and months to finalize the Pandemic Agreement’s annex.
During a video press conference in Geneva on June 16, WHO spokesperson Dr. Tarik Jasarevic added that some Ebola transmission chains might still be flying under the radar, with information gathering still spotty in parts of the DRC.
