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Health officials track dozens who left hantavirus-stricken ship after first fatality 8%
By MOLLY QUELL0% SUMAN NAISHADHAM0% ISABEL DEBRE0% GERALD IMRAY0%
5/7/2026, 8:05:11 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 13 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Hindsight Bias, and Optimism Bias, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 31.4% saturation with 222 hits. Analysis detected 640 faulty-reasoning hits from 707 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 25% and a BS Rank of 8% (15,489 of 16,813 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 92.10% of the article peer group.
MADRID (AP) — Health authorities across four continents Thursday were tracking down and monitoring passengers who disembarked a hantavirus-stricken cruise ship before its deadly outbreak was detected, and trying to trace others who may have come into contact with them since then.
In Argentina, a team of investigators has yet to leave for the southern town where they suspect the outbreak originated, officials from the country’s Health Ministry told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The Argentine investigators suspect a Dutch couple may have contracted the virus while on a bird-watching trip before they boarded the cruise ship.
On April 24, nearly two weeks after the first passenger had died on board, more than two dozen people from at least 12 different countries left the ship without contact tracing, the ship’s operator and Dutch officials said Thursday.
Three people, including the ship’s doctor, were evacuated Wednesday while the ship was near the West African island country of Cape Verde and taken to specialized hospitals in Europe for treatment.
The body of the Dutch man who was the first to die on board on April 11 was taken off the ship on the remote South Atlantic island of St.
Helena on April 24, when his wife also disembarked.
She then flew to South Africa a day later and died there.
It wasn’t until May 2 that health authorities first confirmed hantavirus in a ship passenger, the World Health Organization says.
That was in a British man evacuated from the ship to South Africa three days after the St.
Helena stop.
He was tested in South Africa and is in intensive care there.
The ship’s operator said Thursday that a total of 30 passengers — including the deceased Dutch man and his wife — left the vessel at St.
Helena.
The Dutch Foreign Ministry has put the figure at about 40.
The company had not previously said publicly that dozens more people left the ship on April 24.
The stop was the scheduled end of the cruise for some passengers.
None of the remaining passengers or crew on the ship are currently symptomatic, the Netherlands-based Oceanwide Expeditions cruise ship company said Thursday.
The World Health Organization says the risk to the wider public is low.
Hantavirus is usually spread by the inhalation of contaminated rodent droppings and isn’t easily transmitted between people.
“We believe this will be a limited outbreak if the public health measures are implemented and solidarity is shown across all countries,” said Dr.
Abdirahman Mahamud, the WHO’s alert and response director on Thursday.
Tests have confirmed that at least five people who were on the ship were infected with a hantavirus found in South America, called the Andes virus.
The only hantavirus thought to spread human-to-human, it can cause a severe and often fatal lung disease called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome.
The ship departed from Argentina and investigations into the outbreak’s source are focusing there.
The Dutch couple who presented the first two cases had traveled through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay before boarding the ship, the WHO said.
They visited sites where the species of rat known to carry Andes virus was present.
Argentina’s Health Ministry has zeroed in on the town of Ushuaia in their investigation, but they’ve yet to dispatch the team, according to a written statement given to AP.
Scientists from the state-funded Malbrán Institute planned to travel to Ushuaia “in the coming days,” the statement said.
Once in Ushuaia, a 3.5-hour flight from Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, experts will analyze rodents at the trash heap there to see if they carry the Andes virus, officials said.
The WHO is working with health authorities in Argentina to understand the couple’s movements and has arranged to ship 2,500 diagnostic kits from Argentina to laboratories in five countries.
Argentina’s health ministry said there were 28 deaths from hantavirus last year, up from an average mortality rate of 15 in the five years before that.
Nearly a third of cases last year were fatal, it said.
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Quell reported from The Hague, Netherlands, Imray from Cape Town, South Africa, and DeBre from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
AP writers Jill Lawless in London and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed.
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