By Jennifer Rigby and Bart H. Meijer
AMSTERDAM, May 8 (Reuters) - Two new suspected cases of hantavirus were reported on Friday, one in Spain and the other on the remote South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha, as experts race to contain an outbreak that began on a luxury cruise ship.
The announcements in locations thousands of miles apart will fuel concern about the spread of a virus so far associated with three deaths - though the World Health Organization has repeatedly said the risk to the wider public is low and the virus does not transmit easily.
A 32-year-old woman in the southeastern Spanish province of Alicante has symptoms consistent with a hantavirus infection and is being tested, Spanish health authorities said.
She was briefly sitting on a plane behind a Dutch woman who had contracted the virus on the MV Hondius, Secretary of State for Health Javier Padilla told reporters. That Dutch woman left the flight in Johannesburg feeling ill before it took off on April 25 and later died in hospital.
A British man was also suspected of having the disease on Tristan da Cunha, the UK Health Security Agency said. Officials there said he was a passenger on the Dutch-flagged ship which made a stop on the island on April 13 to 15.
“Based on the dynamics of this outbreak, based on how it is spreading and not spreading amongst the people on the ship, the people who have disembarked, as well, we continue to consider the risk as low for the general population,” Anais Legand, WHO technical officer for viral threats, said in an online briefing.
Both new suspected cases have links to the original cluster of cases, officials said.
FIRST SHIP-BORNE CLUSTER OF CASES
The cruise departed from Argentina in March with around 150 passengers and stopped in the Antarctic and other locations and headed north to waters off Cape Verde where it has briefly held this week after the cases were reported.
WHO officials have confirmed that some of the cases on the ship are caused by the Andes strain of hantavirus, the only version that can spread between people, usually through prolonged and close contact with a person who is showing symptoms.
Three people - a Dutch couple and a German national - have died following the outbreak - the first of its kind on a ship.
Four others confirmed to be infected, two Britons, a Dutch and a Swiss national, are being treated in hospitals in the Netherlands, South Africa and Switzerland, and a fifth case is suspected, according to the World Health Organization.
Those WHO figures do not include the suspected cases on Tristan da Cunha or in Spain. The U.N. health body said it would provide an update later on Friday.
The ship, with around 150 passengers and crew on board, is currently heading to the Canary Islands where they will be screened and disembarked, under new guidelines still being finalised by WHO and other health officials.
Cruise operator Oceanwide on Thursday said there were no people with symptoms of a possible infection remaining on board the ship, which was expected to dock in Tenerife early on Sunday.
CONTACT ON PLANE WAS ‘VERY BRIEF’
The cruise ship stopped at Tristan da Cunha between April 13 and 15, with passengers disembarking to go on nature tours and visit the local shop and pub, online footage of the tour showed.
The UK Health Security Agency did not go into further detail on the British passenger with suspected symptoms.
The UK Minister for the Overseas Territories, Stephen Doughty, said in a statement posted earlier on Tristan da Cunha’s local government website that an islander had been hospitalised and his wife was self-isolating.
It was not immediately clear if he was referring to the same person.
Tristan da Cunha, home to only around 200 people, is halfway between South Africa and South America and the world’s remotest inhabited island, more than 1,500 miles and a six-day boat ride from St Helena, its nearest inhabited neighbour.
The Spanish woman has “mild respiratory symptoms” and had been to a hospital where she will be tested for the virus, with results expected 24 to 48 hours later, according to a statement on the regional health department’s website.
Padilla said the woman was sitting two rows behind the cruise ship passenger, but the contact between them “was brief” since the passenger had only been “on board for a short time”.
Padilla added that Valencia’s regional health authorities were tracing the people the woman has been in contact with over the past few days.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has classified the hantavirus outbreak as a ‘level 3’ emergency response, the lowest level of emergency activation.
Other experts have also stressed the low probability of a widespread contagion, but the outbreak has put authorities on high alert as they urge all who have been in contact with passengers who left the Hondius to watch out for possible symptoms.
Several U.S. states have said they are monitoring asymptomatic residents who had returned home after disembarking from the cruise ship.
Singapore on Thursday isolated and tested two residents who had been aboard the ship.
(Reporting by Bart Meijer, Jennifer Rigby, David Latona and Olivia le Poidevin; writing by Bart Meijer and Aislinn Laing; Additional reporting by Sriparna Roy; Editing by Kim Coghill and Andrew Heavens)
