The Latest: Stricken cruise ship heads for the Canaries as authorities rush to identify contacts
MADRID (AP) — Spanish authorities are preparing to receive a hantavirus-stricken cruise ship headed for the Canary Islands.
Health officials plan careful evacuations of the more than 140 passengers and crew when the MV Hondius arrives in Tenerife this weekend.
At least three passengers have died, and several others are sick. None of the remaining passengers or crew is currently symptomatic.
The U.S. and the U.K. are arranging flights to repatriate their citizens. The World Health Organization says the risk to the wider public is low. Health authorities are tracking passengers who disembarked before the outbreak was detected.
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There is no specific treatment or cure, but early medical attention can increase the chance of survival.
Despite years of research, many questions have yet to be answered, including why hantavirus infection can be mild for some people and severe for others and how antibodies are developed. Some researchers have been following patients over long periods of time in hopes of finding a treatment.
“In the Americas, hantavirus infection is very serious, but it’s also quite rare,” said Steven Bradfute, an associate professor and associate director of the Center for Global Health at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, which specializes in hantavirus research.
“And so for a time that probably led to less research into it because of funding priorities, but I know there’s been a lot of interest in funding hantavirus work of late,” he said.
What researchers do know is that rodent exposure is key.
The best way to avoid the germ is to minimize contact with rodents and their droppings. Use protective gloves and a bleach solution for cleaning up rodent droppings. Public health experts caution against sweeping or vacuuming, which can cause virus particles to get into the air.
South African health department spokesperson Foster Mogale told The Associated Press that the body left Johannesburg on a KLM flight on Thursday.
Posthumous tests on the woman's body came back positive for hantavirus.
Her 70-year-old husband was the first passenger to die on board the MV Hondius on April 11. His body was taken off the cruise ship in the South Atlantic Island of St. Helena on April 24, when she also disembarked to accompany it.
She traveled from St. Helena to Johannesburg on a commercial flight and was trying to take another flight home when she fell seriously ill at O.R. Tambo International Airport. She died at a nearby hospital on April 26.
She was one of dozens of cruise ship passengers who disembarked at St. Helena.
It’s unclear if her husband’s body, which remained on St. Helena, has been repatriated.
The State Department says it is in direct contact with a number of American citizens on board the cruise ship and will offer them a special flight home from Tenerife when the vessel arrives there this weekend.
The department said Friday that U.S. diplomats will be available to provide consular services in Tenerife to the Americans on board and has arranged the special repatriation flight in coordination with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Spanish government.
The person suspected of having hantavirus on the island of Tristan da Cunha was a passenger on the cruise ship that had an outbreak of the disease, the British Foreign Office said.
A British government official indicated the patient was an island resident and was hospitalized but did not say how they may have come in contact with the virus.
Stephen Doughty, the U.K. minister of overseas territories, said in a message sent to the remote British overseas territory that his thoughts were with “the islander currently in hospital and their spouse who is isolating.”
The Foreign Office would not provide additional details, and emails from the AP seeking additional information from Tristan da Cunha officials were not returned.
Hantavirus infections are relatively uncommon globally. The WHO reported that in 2025, eight countries within the Americas had documented 229 cases and 59 deaths.
Argentina’s health ministry said hantavirus led to 28 deaths nationwide last year. The ministry on Tuesday reported 101 hantavirus infections since June 2025, roughly double the caseload recorded over the same period the previous year.
In the U.S., federal health officials began tracking the virus after a 1993 outbreak in the Four Corners region — the area where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet. It was an astute physician with the Indian Health Service who first noticed a pattern of deaths among young patients.
Most U.S. cases are in Western states. New Mexico and Arizona are hot spots, likely because the odds are greater for mouse-human encounters in rural areas.
Detailed investigations of the cruise ship outbreak are ongoing, notably to determine its source.
Investigators in Argentina suspect that the cases were initially contracted during a birdwatching trip in Ushuaia, at the country’s southern tip, two officials told AP.
Argentina has seen a surge of hantavirus cases that many local public health researchers attribute to climate change.
Officials have found evidence of Andes virus, a version of hantavirus found in South America.
The virus usually spreads when people inhale contaminated residue of rodent droppings. Hantaviruses have been around for centuries and are thought to exist around the world.
But global health officials say the risk to the general public remains low because the germ does not easily spread between people.
“This is not the next COVID, but it is a serious infectious disease,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness at the World Health Organization. “Most people will never be exposed to this.”
The disease gained renewed attention last year after the late actor Gene Hackman ’s wife, Betsy Arakawa, died from a hantavirus infection in New Mexico.
Health authorities across four continents were continuing to track down and monitor passengers who disembarked the ship before the deadly outbreak was detected. They are also trying to trace others who may have come into contact with them since then.
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.
It wasn’t until May 2 that health authorities first confirmed hantavirus in a ship passenger, the World Health Organization said.
The KLM flight attendant who tested negative for the virus was working on a flight headed from Johannesburg to Amsterdam on April 25, and had later fallen ill. She was taken to an isolation ward at an Amsterdam hospital on Thursday.
The cruise passenger briefly aboard the flight — a Dutch woman whose husband died on the ship — was too ill to stay on the international flight to Europe. She was taken off the plane in Johannesburg, where she died.
The MV Hondius is expected to reach Tenerife, off the coast of West Africa, on Saturday or Sunday.
Passengers “will arrive at a completely isolated, cordoned-off area,” said Virginia Barcones, Spain’s head of emergency services, on Thursday.
The MV Hondius is a Dutch-flagged vessel and Dutch officials said Friday they were also in close contact with the ship’s owner and authorities of countries whose citizens are on board.
The United States has agreed to send a plane to the Canary Islands to repatriate its 17 citizens from the cruise ship, Barcones said. The British government also said it will charter a plane to evacuate the nearly two dozen British citizens on board.
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