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11 Cases of Andes Hantavirus Confirmed Among Passengers on Dutch Cruise Ship
The Andes strain of hantavirus, capable of person-to-person transmission and not found locally in the U.S., has infected 11 passengers on a Dutch cruise ship, forcing international travelers into quarantine. NBC News reported the outbreak draws on lessons from past clusters including the 1993 Four Corners event and 2018-2019 super-spreader incidents in Argentina.
May 12, 5:00 PM·3m read1 source
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Hantavirus has infected 11 passengers on a Dutch cruise ship, forcing passengers from across the world to quarantine. U.S. NBC News reported that the Andes strain is linked to the pygmy rice rat native in parts of Argentina and Chile.
The current outbreak will teach doctors more about the virus because few events have involved more than a handful of patients, said Dr. Gregory Mertz, emeritus professor of internal medicine at the University of New Mexico. "Because the disease is so incredibly rare, it's been very difficult to study in the sense that we don't really have the numbers," said Dr.
Charles Chiu, a professor of laboratory medicine and infectious diseases at University of California, San Francisco. The first known hantavirus outbreak occurred during the Korean War in the 1950s, when around 3,000 United Nations troops developed a mysterious illness that was later recognized as hantavirus. In 1978 scientists linked the virus to a rodent near the Hantan river in South Korea.
The virus was named hantavirus after the Hantan river in South Korea. The first cases in North America were diagnosed in 1993. In 1993 public health officials began investigating a cluster of illnesses in the Four Corners region where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet.
The first alarming case in the 1993 Four Corners outbreak was a 19-year-old long distance runner in New Mexico whose fiancée had died of an unknown respiratory illness. U.S. with 20 deaths.
The 1993 Four Corners strain is known as Sin Nombre. The Sin Nombre strain was linked to a deer mouse that became more prevalent after unusually heavy rain and snow in spring 1993. Most human cases of hantavirus in North America are the Sin Nombre strain acquired through aerosolized urine, feces or saliva of infected rodents.
