The MV Hondius docked, the passengers went home, and now health officials on three continents are trying to pin down exactly where Andes virus got on board. Welcome to Hantavirus Watch — I'm Devin. If you were anywhere near southern Argentina or Chile in the last few weeks, this one is for you. I'm Cassidy. We’ve got confirmed cases, a disputed exposure site, and a Patagonian village that’s seen this movie before, so let’s separate what’s confirmed from what’s still being sourced. And I’m going to ask the question nobody in the press releases wants to answer straight: if you were on that ship, what do you do right now? Here's RNZ News:
Three people have died and at least six others appear to be infected after an outbreak of hantavirus on the cruise ship MV Hondius, which was travelling around South America last month.
Passengers on the cruise ship have been evacuated in the Canary Islands. One New Zealander has been confirmed to be among them.
Let’s be exact here: this is the MV Hondius, Dutch-flagged, with three confirmed deaths and at least six more infections. Passengers were disembarking in Tenerife as of May 10th. WHO hasn’t publicly named the strain yet, but the South American geography points toward Andes virus — the hantavirus strain with documented person-to-person spread. Tenerife. The Canary Islands. So if you were on that ship, or you connected through Gran Canaria, the real question is whether you had close contact with someone who was symptomatic — and what 'close contact' means for this virus, not the Covid version. WHO Director-General Tedros has said this is not another Covid, and the public health risk remains low. That fits the biology — Andes has never taken off as a sustained outbreak outside clusters. Still, I want the strain confirmed before anybody starts dropping the asterisk. From BBC News:
But in recent days it has been grappling with a different kind of fame, one that has cast a shadow over local businesses and officials: the suggestion it could be 'ground zero' for the hantavirus outbreak on the Dutch vessel MV Hondius.
Following up on the source question from last edition: Ushuaia is pushing back hard on the idea that it seeded the Hondius cluster. To be clear, the strain still hasn’t been publicly named in official reporting, but the exposure window and the rodent-contact geography point toward Andes virus, not Sin Nombre. A landfill on the edge of town where tourists go birdwatching and rats are everywhere — that’s not some wild theory, that’s a plausible stop on the itinerary. If you were on that ship and you visited that site in early April, talk to a clinician now. Don’t wait for Argentina to sort out its PR. One hundred fourteen passengers, sixty-one crew, twenty-two countries — and the part that’s still unresolved is confirmed cases versus exposed contacts. 'Believed to have come aboard in Ushuaia' is an inference. It is not a confirmed epidemiological finding. The ship is sitting in Tenerife right now. So if you flew home from the Canaries this week and you were on MV Hondius, that’s the detail that matters — not whether Ushuaia’s tourism board feels bad about the coverage. From The Independent:
The World Health Organization(WHO) said that detailed investigations are currently underway into the incident, including extensive laboratory testing and epidemiological studies to understand the virus's spread. Sequencing of the virus from the current outbreak is also ongoing.
Hard stop on the word 'suspected' — WHO says sequencing is still ongoing, so we do not have strain confirmation yet. And that matters a lot: Andes virus, the one with documented limited human-to-human spread, is a very different risk profile from Sin Nombre, which is rodent-to-human. Three dead, twenty Brits in an isolation facility right now — I need the ship, the itinerary, and the dock where people got sick. Because if your family was on a South American cruise in the last three weeks, 'investigations are underway' is not an answer. Until sequencing comes back, the clinical picture is what matters: the Eastern Hemisphere hemorrhagic-fever strains and the New World pulmonary strains do not present the same way. One is fever-plus-kidney failure; the other can move into rapid respiratory collapse. Clinicians at that UK isolation facility need to know which one they’re watching for. And the Gene Hackman household-name drop is going to send half the internet into a spiral — that was New Mexico, rodent exposure, no ship involved. Keep those two stories in separate boxes. Deutsche Welle, with Zulfikar Abbany:
But there is a significant difference between COVID and hantavirus.
"Hantaviruses — including the Andes virus — are fundamentally different from coronaviruses," Roman Wölfel, head of the Bundeswehr Institute of Microbiology, told DW. "They can be transmitted from person to person, but far less easily and only through very close contact."
Let’s be precise here: the strain on the MV Hondius is Andes virus — not Sin Nombre, not Seoul. That distinction matters because Andes is the one with documented person-to-person transmission, which is why WHO’s Tedros wrote directly to Tenerife residents ahead of docking. Three deaths, 147 passengers and crew about to scatter to Germany, France, and Australia — and it took more than three weeks to confirm hantavirus after the first death. That timeline is what should worry people, not the docking itself. Roman Wölfel from the Bundeswehr Institute put it cleanly: person-to-person transmission is possible with Andes, but it takes very close contact. We are nowhere near the airborne, high-efficiency spread that made COVID ungovernable. Those are not the same biological threat. Fine, but 'very close contact' on a cruise ship — shared cabins, shared bathrooms — is exactly the kind of setup that closes that gap. So what are repatriated passengers supposed to watch for, and how long after they get home? This one's from NDTV:
While the Hondius outbreak has left three people dead, it has yet to surpass the Epuyen outbreak, which recorded 34 cases and 11 fatalities between December 2018 and March 2019 in the town of 2,400 residents, situated in a part of the Andes where hantavirus is endemic.
To put the Hondius numbers in context: three confirmed deaths, Andes virus, and person-to-person transmission documented aboard the ship. The Epuyen outbreak in the same Patagonian corridor ran 34 cases and 11 fatalities between December 2018 and March 2019 — and that’s the comparison locals are living with right now. Epuyen had a 45-day quarantine for contacts in a town of 2,400 people. So if you were anywhere near the Hondius itinerary and you’re brushing this off because 'it’s not that bad yet' — that 2018 outbreak is exactly why you don’t wait. And the strain matters here: Andes virus is the one with confirmed human-to-human spread. That’s not true of Sin Nombre or Seoul. So the transmission playbook is genuinely different, and the quarantine logic from Epuyen wasn’t theater. You’ll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, they’re there for a closer read.
That’s Hantavirus Watch for this Tuesday, May 12th. Thanks for listening. This is a Lantern Podcast.