11 Cases of Andes Hantavirus Confirmed Among Passengers on Dutch Cruise Ship

Hantavirus has infected 11 passengers on a Dutch cruise ship, forcing passengers from across the world to quarantine. 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. 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.

U.S. from 1993 to 2023. Up to half of hantavirus cases can be fatal depending on the strain and method of transmission. In 2012 10 people contracted the Sin Nombre strain after staying overnight at Yosemite National Park in California.

Three of the 10 Yosemite campers in 2012 died. All but one of the 2012 Yosemite campers slept in cabins later found to have rodents in the wall insulation. Mono County, California has recorded 27 hantavirus cases since 1993, the most in the state, according to Tom Boo, the public health officer for Mono County, California.

"You have to be kind of unlucky to get Sin Nombre virus," Boo said. " Hantavirus gained further attention last year after Betsy Arakawa died of hantavirus at the couple’s home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Gene Hackman died roughly a week after his wife Betsy Arakawa.

A state assessment found rodents and rodent feces on the Hackman-Arakawa property in Santa Fe but not in the main living quarters. The Andes strain is the only hantavirus known to spread from person to person. The first recognized human-to-human transmission cases of Andes strain occurred in 1996 across three towns in southern Argentina.

In 1996 an outbreak in Argentina marked the first confirmed instance of person-to-person transmission of hantavirus. Three of the 18 cases in the 1996 Argentina outbreak were doctors caring directly for an infected patient. Scientists learned more about human transmission after super-spreader events in Argentina in 2018 and 2019.

The events led to 34 infections and 11 deaths. In the 2018-2019 Argentina events one person attended a birthday party for 90 minutes while having fever and muscle aches and presumably infected five others. One infected person in the 2018-2019 Argentina events attended her husband’s wake while she had a fever and ten people who had close contact became ill.

Before containment measures in the 2018-2019 Argentina outbreak one infected person was spreading the virus to about two others on average. A 2020 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine determined that patients with a high viral load were more likely to spread hantavirus.

The 2020 New England Journal of Medicine paper determined that hantavirus transmission was more likely at massive social gatherings or with extensive contact with an infected person.

"There is a possibility of spread in an enclosed, cramped space," Chiu said. The cruise ship outbreak meets that criteria, he said — especially if people shared a room with an infected person or had a drink with them at the bar for several hours. "At least in terms of the behavior of the virus currently, how we're seeing these cases evolve, there's nothing that's inconsistent with what we already know about the virus or suspect about this virus," Chiu said.