Spain's Ministry of Health was finalising arrangements on Friday for the arrival in Tenerife of the MV Hondius, a Dutch-flagged expedition cruise ship hit by an outbreak of the rare and often fatal Andes strain of hantavirus. The vessel, operated by Oceanwide Expeditions, is expected to dock on Saturday after sailing from anchorage off Cape Verde, where local authorities had refused to allow it to disembark.
The ship is carrying 147 passengers and crew, predominantly British, American and Spanish nationals, on a luxury polar voyage that began at the southern tip of Argentina in late March and visited the Antarctic Peninsula, South Georgia and Tristan da Cunha before turning north. Three people have died — a Dutch couple and a German national — and one passenger remains critically ill in an onboard medical bay.
The World Health Organization has confirmed two laboratory-positive cases and five suspected cases of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome among passengers and crew. The Andes strain, named for the South American mountain range where it was first identified, is unusual among hantaviruses for its capacity for limited human-to-human transmission, a feature that has driven the unusual public health response.
On arrival, passengers and crew will be examined and either treated or repatriated through dedicated medical transport to avoid contact with the local population. Spain's health ministry said it had coordinated the operation with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and with consular authorities in the affected countries.
Public health officials in Georgia, Arizona, California, Texas and Virginia are monitoring residents who left the ship at earlier stops and have since returned to the United States. A Swiss confirmed case in a passenger who flew home before the outbreak was identified has prompted contact tracing across several European countries.
Hantavirus typically spreads through contact with the urine, droppings or saliva of infected rodents, and the source of the shipboard outbreak has not been formally identified. Investigators are examining whether deer mice or other rodents were taken aboard with cargo at one of the ship's remote landfalls, or whether passengers brought the pathogen on from a shore excursion.
Andes hantavirus carries a case-fatality rate of around thirty per cent. There is no specific antiviral treatment; supportive care, particularly oxygenation and management of fluid overload, is the standard approach. Public health experts have stressed that the risk to the broader population in the Canary Islands or the wider European Union remains low, given the limited and well-defined exposure window.