A French national evacuated from a cruise ship linked to a deadly hantavirus outbreak has tested positive for the virus, France’s health minister said.
The woman was one of five French passengers flown back from the MV Hondius and isolated in Paris after the vessel became the focus of an international repatriation effort.
Health Minister Stephanie Rist said the woman began to feel very unwell on Sunday night and later received a positive test result. The four other French passengers from the ship tested negative, but will be re-tested, she said.
Officials have so far identified 22 hantavirus contact cases in France, as countries continued to monitor passengers from the ship and their contacts. Three passengers from the MV Hondius have died, while others have fallen ill with the rare disease, which usually spreads among rodents and has no vaccine or specific treatment.
The latest French case came as authorities across Europe and North America kept up efforts to repatriate passengers and crew from the Dutch-flagged vessel. On Sunday, 94 people of 19 different nationalities were evacuated from the ship, which had been anchored near Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands after the outbreak emerged.
Spanish officials said the repatriation of most of the ship’s nearly 150 passengers and crew, who represented 23 nationalities, would continue until the final flights to Australia and the Netherlands on Monday afternoon.
The operation moved passengers by army bus from the small industrial port of Granadilla to Tenerife South airport, where they boarded flights out of the island. AFP journalists saw passengers wearing blue medical suits disembark and travel in convoy as the repatriation gathered pace.
The British group was among those moved off the ship, with a plane carrying 20 UK citizens arriving in Manchester on Sunday. Officials said they would be taken to a hospital near Liverpool for tests and about 72 hours of quarantine.
In Greece, the health ministry said a Greek male evacuee would spend 45 days in mandatory hospital quarantine in Athens.
Fourteen Spanish citizens will also be isolated at a military hospital in Madrid.
US officials said 17 American passengers would not necessarily be quarantined at a specialised centre in Nebraska. Jay Bhattacharya, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said passengers could choose to go home “without exposing other people on the way”.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was on Tenerife to help supervise the evacuations, said that policy “may have risks”. Maria Van Kerkhove, the UN body’s epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention director, said the WHO recommends a 42-day quarantine and “active follow-up”, including daily checks for symptoms such as fever.
The hantavirus linked to the ship is the Andes virus, the only type known to spread between humans. That has increased concern over the outbreak, although health officials have insisted the risk to the wider public remains low.
The MV Hondius left Ushuaia, Argentina, on 1 April for a cruise across the Atlantic to Cape Verde, where three infected people were evacuated to Europe earlier in the week. The WHO believes the first infection happened before the expedition started and that person-to-person transmission then occurred onboard.
Argentine provincial health official Juan Petrina has disputed that account, saying there was an “almost zero chance” the Dutch man linked to the outbreak contracted the disease in Ushuaia, citing the virus’s incubation period and other factors. Health authorities in several countries are still tracking passengers who have already disembarked and anyone they may have exposed.
The ship’s repatriation continued under pressure from weather conditions, with Canary Islands authorities warning the operation had to be completed by Monday. The regional government had resisted taking the ship into port, allowing only offshore anchoring, while the central government said there would be no contact with Tenerife’s population.
The MV Hondius is expected to depart for the Netherlands with about 30 crew members at 7:00pm local time on Monday. The vessel had originally set out on a cruise that has now become an urgent international public health response.
