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Europe Counts 12 Hantavirus Cases as Cruise Ship Passengers Stay Healthy

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control's Sunday hantavirus surveillance print holds the MV Hondius cluster at twelve cases — ten confirmed by reference-laboratory PCR and two probable on serology — with three deaths and no new death in more than twenty days. [1] Captain Jan Dobrogowski disembarked symptom-free in Rotterdam on Saturday after the seventy-five-day onboard surveillance window closed without his case status changing. The eighteen U.S. passengers held at the Nebraska Quarantine Facility have May 31 as their twenty-one-day Andes-virus incubation mark. The U.S. CDC's domestic hantavirus tracker reads 22 cases on a separate, unconnected reporting base. [2]

The paper's Sunday brief on the captain's walk-off named the institutional discipline as the operational story. Monday's print is the same verdict carried one document forward: ECDC's surveillance log, after a full holiday weekend, has the same twelve. No port worker, hospital contact, or Rotterdam community case has surfaced. Spain's 42-day quarantine on repatriated passengers — set to the maximum Andes incubation period — runs into early July. Oceanwide Expeditions, the operator, has not posted to its press feed since the cohort closure was announced; the company's last operational statement remains the May 21 ship-clearance notice. [3]

Andes virus is the only hantavirus known to transmit person-to-person, and even then only through close, sustained contact — the kind a shared cabin provides and a port quay does not. The general-population risk has been assessed as low by both WHO and ECDC throughout. The cluster the paper has been counting against the Bundibugyo PHEIC — one bounded, one not — is now into the second week of the same answer it gave on Day One: the procedure worked, the captain walked off, and the next entry in the surveillance log is the May 31 Nebraska release.

-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago

Sources & X Posts

News Sources
[1] https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/infectious-disease-topics/hantavirus-infection/surveillance-and-updates/andes-hantavirus-outbreak
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/surveillance/index.html
[3] https://oceanwide-expeditions.com/news

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