A Frenchman was being monitored as a hantavirus “contact case” after he travelled on the same plane as a cruise ship passenger suffering from the respiratory disease, French authorities said Wednesday.
The MV Hondius cruise ship off Cape Verde has been at the centre of an international health scare since Saturday, when the UN’s health agency WHO was informed that three passengers had died of suspected hantavirus.
Among the victims, a Dutch woman died in South Africa on April 26 after having left the cruise following the death of her husband.
Officials are trying to trace people on the commercial flight that transported her from the island of Saint Helena to Johannesburg, which South African-based carrier Airlink said was carrying 82 passengers and six crew.
“A French national has in particular been identified among the passengers on a flight taken by one of the cases before they were hospitalised,” a spokeswoman for France’s health ministry said.
The Dutch-flagged cruise ship set sail from Ushuaia in Argentina on April 1 on a voyage through the Atlantic Ocean.
It counted 88 passengers and 59 crew members, with 23 nationalities onboard, the WHO said. Five passengers are French.
WHO has said three hantavirus cases have been laboratory confirmed — a Dutch woman who died in South Africa, a British man being treated in Johannesburg and a man being treated in the Swiss city of Zurich.
The British man was medically evacuated from Britain’s Ascension Island to South Africa.
Laboratory testing in South Africa and Switzerland confirmed the cases from the ship were the Andes strain of the hantavirus, the only one known to pass between humans.
The rare disease is usually spread from infected rodents, typically through urine, droppings and saliva.
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