LIVE: Hunt for missing British Hantavirus cruise passenger

The UK Health Security Agency has said it is aware of seven British nationals who disembarked from the MV Hondius cruise ship in St Helena last month with efforts continuing to find one who has not returned to the UK.

In a statement, the UKHSA said:

Two of these individuals are now self-isolating in the UK while the others have not yet returned.

Four of these individuals remain in St Helena and we are in touch with the relevant health officials to provide advice on contact management.

Tracing efforts are continuing to find the seventh individual, health chiefs say. The passengers left the ship on April 24.

The MV Hondius cruise ship has been hit by a rare hantavirus outbreak which is believed to have killed three people so far.

The ship is sailing from Cape Verde towards the Spanish island of Tenerife where isolating passengers and crew will be finally be evacuated.

Watch our explainer on how the virus on board the ship has developed into a global health scare.

The World Health Organisation is working with all of the countries who have passengers onboard the MV Hondius to ensure their ‘onward passage home’.

Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, director of the department of epidemic and pandemic threat management at the WHO said:

We are working with all of the countries who have nationalities that are on board to discuss the plans for the safe journey of those patients home, once they disembark, once they’re medically evaluated, what those decisions will be.

It needs to be very carefully done, but we are working with the countries about that onward passage home.

Passengers on MV Hondius will be ‘completely isolated’ from members of the public when it arrives in the Canary Islands, officials have insisted.

Spain’s head of civil protection Virginia Barcones said travellers can expect to be taken on a 10-minute drive to planes to fly back to their countries once they are ready to be evacuated.

She said:

Mechanisms are being put together, but they will be completely isolated from the public. They will be taken to an isolated fenced off place, they will be in isolated vehicles, they will reach an area of the airport that will be completely isolated.

There is no possibility of contact.

Spanish authorities say the risk to public health posed by the MV Hondius cruise ship following a hantavirus outbreak is ‘very low’.

Pedro Gullon, the general director of public health and equity in Spain, told a briefing the ship will be inspected as soon as it arrived in the Canary Islands.

He said:

Then we are in touch with doctors on board so we get a daily update on everything that’s happening on the boat. Once we know what’s going on, if there are no new cases, we can proceed to take people to their place of origin.

He added:

The risk for the public is a very low risk, it’s important to know this.

The MV Hondius has been at the centre of an international health scare since Saturday, when the UN’s health agency was informed that three passengers had died and the suspected cause was hantavirus.

Cruise operator Oceanwide Expeditions said earlier Thursday that 30 passengers of at least 12 different nationalities had left the cruise during a stopover on April 24 on the British island of St Helena.

The ship first set sail from Ushuaia in Argentina on April 1, destined for Cape Verde, and cost £10,000 per person.

Here’s a map of its sailing:

Footage captured from Wednesday’s evacuation shows medics wearing hazmat suits boarding the luxury MV Hondius off the coast of Cape Verde, in a desperate attempt to get three patients to specialist treatment in Europe.

Separate videos and images show the patients – also wearing personal protective equipment – lying on stretchers as they are wheeled into an ambulance.

As others fell ill, passengers and crew have been in isolation after Cape Verde authorities barred the ship from docking. The ship has been anchored just off the island nation’s capital, Praia, for days.

New footage from inside the vessel showed the ship’s decks mostly deserted, with only a few people wearing medical masks moving about. Common spaces were empty as passengers were isolated in their cabins.

Another video shared on social media by Turkish influencer Ruhi Cenet shows the moment the vessel’s crew told passengers someone had died.

More than two dozen passengers from at least 12 different countries left a cruise ship hit by a deadly hantavirus outbreak without contact tracing nearly two weeks after the first passenger died on board, officials said today.

Health authorities on at least four continents are now tracking down and in some cases monitoring the cruise passengers who returned home on April 24, and trying to trace others who may have come into contact with them.

Experts say the risk to the wider public is considered low because hantavirus – usually spread by the inhalation of contaminated rodent droppings – isn’t easily transmitted between people.

The Dutch health ministry said Thursday that a flight attendant on a plane briefly boarded by an infected cruise passenger in South Africa was showing symptoms of hantavirus and would be tested in an isolation ward at a hospital in Amsterdam.

The cruise passenger, also a Dutch woman, was too ill to fly and was taken off the plane in Johannesburg, where she died.

If the woman tests positive, she could be the first known person not on the MV Hondius to become infected in the outbreak.

by Imogen Garfinkel, Senior Foreign News Reporter

The stewardess on a flight that a hantavirus-infected cruise passenger tried to board before dying a day later is now feared to have caught the fatal disease.

It comes as a guest still stuck on the MV Hondius has revealed that social distancing has only been in place for three days, with staff organising a ‘big barbecue as if nothing had happened’, despite the deadly rat-borne virus.

Three people have died after becoming infected with the hantavirus on the vessel, currently on its way to the Canary Islands to evacuate passengers after being stranded for days in Cape Verde.

The evacuation of the remaining 146 passengers has been delayed, after the president of the Canaries refused to let the ship dock at the archipelago for fear of contaminating the civilian population.

Read our top story here:

Authorities in Tenerife have voiced anger as the MV Hondius heads to the Canaries.

The islands’ regional officials have bristled at the Spanish government over the reception of the vessel.

After talks with Madrid on Thursday, Canaries leader Fernando Clavijo told reporters that the ship will not dock and will only anchor offshore

Other boats will be used to transfer passengers from the ship to the airport for their repatriation, added Clavijo.

‘Under no circumstances will the passengers leave the ship until the aircraft is at the airport, and it will be done with full guarantees,’ Clavijo said.

A health ministry statement added that Tenerife’s industrial port of Granadilla, where the MV Hondius is due to arrive this weekend, ‘is not prepared for the disembarkation of people’.

Here is what we know so far about the situation on the Hondius, which has sparked international alarm since news of the outbreak emerged last weekend.

• Who is on board?

There are 149 people from 23 different nationalities on the MV Hondius, the ship’s Dutch operator Oceanwide Expeditions told AFP on Thursday.

There are more than 80 passengers, with the largest groups from Britain, the United States and Spain. Most of the crew are from the Philippines.

Following Wednesday’s evacuation of three suspected cases, the ship operator said Thursday “no symptomatic individuals are present on board”.

• Three deaths

A Dutch couple who had travelled around South America before boarding the ship in Ushuaia, Argentina on April 1 were the first fatalities.

The husband, 70, showed symptoms on April 6 and died on April 11. His body was taken off the ship during its April 22-24 call at Saint Helena, an island in the south Atlantic.

His 69-year-old wife, who was feeling unwell, also left the ship at Saint Helena. Her health deteriorated during an April 25 flight to Johannesburg and she died in hospital a day later, with hantavirus confirmed on May 4.

A German passenger who developed a fever on April 28, which became pneumonia, died on May 2. Her body remains on the ship.

The rare disease is usually spread from infected rodents, typically through urine, droppings and saliva.

Laboratory testing in South Africa and Switzerland confirmed the two patients being treated in those countries had the Andes strain of hantavirus – the only one known to pass between humans.

There are no vaccines or specific treatments for hantavirus.

• The journey

The cruise began on April 1, with 114 guests boarding at Ushuaia, Oceanwide Expeditions said.

After South Georgia, Tristan da Cunha and other Atlantic islands, the vessel called at Saint Helena, where 30 guests disembarked on April 24.

The Hondius then stopped at Ascension Island on April 27, before anchoring off Praia, the capital of Cape Verde, from Sunday until it set sail for the Canaries late Wednesday.

Spain’s health ministry has said the ship is expected in Tenerife on Sunday, with evacuation of passengers set to start on May 11.

• What is happening on board

The WHO said passengers were being asked to isolate in their cabins while disinfection and other measures are being taken.

A former passenger told AFP that life carried on as usual aboard the ship after the captain announced the first passenger’s death.

‘We again kept eating all together… and we didn’t wear any masks,’ said Turkish national Ruhi Cenet, who left the cruise in Saint Helena.

Hantavirus is much less transmissible than Covid, a doctor treating a patient following the cruise ship outbreak has said.

In an interview with AFPTV, Karin Ellen Veldkamp, head of infectious diseases at a Dutch hospital, said her unit was ready to receive more patients if required.

Asked about fears the hantavirus could be the new Covid, Veldkamp said: ‘No, it is not like that. It is not easily transmissible from person to person.’

‘We know (person-to-person transmission) is possible and we suspect that has happened on the boat… but it is not like Covid, (transmission) is much more difficult’.

Veldkamp declined to give precise details about the patient that arrived at her hospital on Wednesday, but said the hospital was well equipped for such cases.

Patients are kept in an isolation room, cared for by well-trained staff and strict disease control protocols, she explained.

See our Hantavirus explainer below: