By Matteo Negri and Makini Brice
ROME/PARIS/AMSTERDAM, May 13 (Reuters) - Seventeen people under observation in Italy and Spain for possible hantavirus infection have tested negative, the countries’ health ministries said on Wednesday as governments around the globe track the virus to stop it from spreading.
The MV Hondius cruise ship, which had confirmed hantavirus cases on board, is expected to arrive at the Dutch port of Rotterdam on Monday, shipowner Oceanwide Expeditions said, adding that the remaining 25 crew members, along with two medical staff, will follow quarantine procedures set by Dutch authorities upon arrival.
The World Health Organization said on Tuesday more cases were expected from the cluster that broke out on the ship during a polar expedition that departed from Argentina, but it stressed this was nothing like COVID and was not a pandemic.
Hantavirus is primarily spread by rodents but can be transmitted between people in rare cases. That requires close contact. Incubation can last about six weeks, and crew, passengers and people in contact with them have been quarantined in several European countries.
QUARANTINE
Three people - a Dutch couple and a German national - have died since the start of the outbreak.
Some European health ministers were to meet on Wednesday afternoon to share information and better coordinate their response to the virus, French Health Minister Stephanie Rist told parliament.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has recommended quarantine for all asymptomatic passengers from the original cruise ship for six weeks, until June 21/22 depending on when they left the boat.
The WHO has increased its tally of confirmed cases in the outbreak to nine, with an additional two suspected cases: one person who died before being tested, and one on Tristan da Cunha, a remote South Atlantic island where there were no tests available. So far, all are considered to have been contaminated on the cruise trip or before boarding.
TESTING
In Italy, tests were conducted on an Argentine tourist hospitalized with pneumonia, a man from the southern Italian region of Calabria who was in voluntary isolation, a British tourist located in Milan and a companion travelling with him. Two of them had come into contact with a Dutch woman who later died from the virus.
All tests came back negative, the Italian health ministry said in a statement. “The risk connected with the virus remains very low in Europe and therefore also in Italy,” it added.
In Spain, new PCR tests on 13 Spaniards quarantined at a military hospital in Madrid had again yielded negative results, health ministry official Javier Padilla told broadcaster TVE. The man who had earlier tested positive had suffered some difficulties while breathing overnight, but was now stable.
In France, health minister Rist said she expected on Wednesday the outcome of tests carried out on 22 people for having been in contact with someone with the virus.
The hunt for new cases could drag on for months, since the incubation time for each case was up to about six weeks, Arnaud Fontanet, head of Epidemiology of Emerging Diseases at France’s Pasteur Institute, told Reuters on Tuesday. Still, because it does not transmit easily, his guess was that there would be no more than a few dozen more cases in total.
(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon, Makini Brice in Paris, Matteo Negri in Rome, David Latona in Madrid, Charlotte Van Campenhout in Amsterdam; writing by Ingrid Melander and Gavin Jones; editing by Crispian Balmer, William Maclean, Rod Nickel)
