Eleven cases now tie back to the MV Hondius — nine confirmed Andes hantavirus, two still suspected — and that contact-tracing net is stretching across several countries. This is Hantavirus Watch. I'm Devin, with Cassidy. And yeah, if you were on that ship, or you know someone who was, this is the episode you want. And we need to be really specific here: Andes is not Sin Nombre, and person-to-person spread changes the contact-tracing math. So let's stick to what the WHO and ECDC have actually confirmed, not what people are assuming. Because 'contacts are being traced' is way too vague on its own. Tell people which ports, which nationalities, which itinerary window we're talking about. From CIDRAP:
A Spanish passenger on the MV Hondius cruise ship who was in quarantine at a military hospital in Madrid is now confirmed to have hantavirus, raising the outbreak total to 11 cases, nine of which have been lab-confirmed. The death toll remains at three.
So the MV Hondius total is now 11 cases — nine lab-confirmed hantavirus, three deaths — and that Spanish passenger who'd been quarantined at a military hospital in Madrid is now in the confirmed count. And the source hunt we flagged yesterday got more concrete: investigators are literally heading to a landfill in Argentina to trace where a Dutch couple was exposed. Twelve Dutch hospital staff in quarantine because of improper handling of bodily fluids — that's the part listeners need to hear. If you were on that ship and then got care anywhere in Europe, your team should have been briefed on contact precautions. Tedros said it straight: there's no sign of a larger outbreak starting, but with a 42-day incubation window, more cases could still surface. That's not alarm, that's math. So far every case is tied to MV Hondius passengers, and there is zero transmission outside that chain. And the French woman who got sick mid-flight to Paris is in stable condition in an ICU. So if you were on that flight, or even just shared that travel window through a European airport, that's a doctor conversation — not a 'wait and see.' Most people in the U.S. have probably heard hantavirus warnings in the deer-mouse-in-a-cabin context. So what makes the Andes strain different, and why does that matter so much for everyone tied to this cruise ship? Right — the hantaviruses Americans usually run into, Sin Nombre being the familiar one, spread through particles from infected rodent droppings or urine. Person-to-person transmission basically doesn't happen with those strains. Andes virus is the exception. The ECDC says it's the only hantavirus strain documented to spread from person to person, and CNN Health reported on a 2018 outbreak in the Argentine village of Epuyen where nearly three dozen people fell gravely ill and eleven died, with person-to-person spread confirmed in that cluster. Now put that on the MV Hondius. WHO's Disease Outbreak News from May 9 put the case fatality ratio at 38 percent — three deaths out of eight cases at that point — and NBC News reported on May 11 that the latest confirmed cases were all among people with direct contact with earlier patients, not people with any obvious rodent exposure. That's why contact tracing went multinational so fast: passengers had already disembarked before the first case was even reported, and people spread out across the U.S., the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, Argentina, and Cape Verde, among other places. So if the confirmed cases are following direct-contact lines, what does that mean for the 18 Americans now in quarantine — are we talking about people who are sick, or people who might get sick? Mostly the latter, at least based on the mid-week reporting. NBC News says at least three of those 18 Americans are being closely watched for possible infection, which means they're exposed contacts under monitoring, not confirmed cases. And the Institut Pasteur is very clear that the risk depends a lot on how close and what kind of contact someone had with a confirmed case. So if you were on that ship, or you know someone who was, and you have any respiratory symptoms, don't try to sort it out yourself — call your local health department or a clinician and let them walk through the exposure history with you. If you follow Hantavirus Watch for clear daily updates, try Arcadia Mayor Spy Watch: daily court-watch on the federal foreign-agent prosecution of former Arcadia mayor Eileen Wang and the resolved Yaoning “Mike” Sun case. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
If you want to dig further into anything we covered today, you’ll find links to every story in the show notes. Pick up the ones that caught your ear there.
That’s Hantavirus Watch for this Wednesday, May 13. This is a Lantern Podcast.