The Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced on Sunday that the current status of the hantavirus outbreak is “stable for now.”
Tedros detailed that the WHO has recorded 12 hantavirus cases and three fatalities, with no additional deaths reported since May 2. The outbreak is suspected to have emerged from South America, following the embarkation of infected travelers on the cruise ship MV Hondius earlier this month.
“All passengers and crew are in quarantine and are being closely monitored to ensure they receive necessary care,” Tedros shared via the social media platform X. “The situation is stable for now, but we are maintaining vigilance and staying in close communication with all concerned governments.”
This update follows an announcement from Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last Friday. He declared that he had signed a Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act declaration aimed at facilitating the development and deployment of medical interventions for the Andes virus strain of hantavirus.
“This measure helps eliminate obstacles to research and response initiatives as we continue to track the recent outbreak linked to the South Atlantic cruise ship,” Kennedy stated in a social media post. “HHS is taking this matter seriously and will keep working to safeguard public health and support the safe development of potential treatments and countermeasures.”
Argentina’s Ministry of Health said a Dutch couple took part in a bird-watching tour that stopped at a garbage dump and they may have been exposed to infected rats. The couple, along with a German national, contracted the Andes strain and died.
Argentinian health officials said a team of scientific experts would be dispatched to investigate the origin of the outbreak, as the MV Hondius departed the country on April 1, the Associated Press previously reported.
Seventeen Americans and one British national exposed to hantavirus on the cruise ship were quarantined either in Nebraska or Georgia while health officials monitored them for symptoms. Most have not shown symptoms of hantavirus, though one person tested positive without being symptomatic, while another had mild symptoms but did not test positive.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said earlier this month that there were no cases of the Andes strain in the U.S.
Health officials regularly assured that the outbreak did not resemble the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and emphasized the differences between both viruses when it came to close-contact infection and the incubation period.
But an outbreak of the Ebola Bundibugyo virus disease, in which there are more than 500 suspected cases in the Congo alone, prompted the WHO to declare the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.