BUENOS AIRES – The Argentine government has intensified its probe into the hantavirus outbreak that recently affected an Atlantic cruise ship. The outbreak has prompted officials to dispatch scientists to the western province of Mendoza, where they will trap and examine rats, while they await lab results from the southern city of Ushuaia.
Authorities in Argentina have announced that biologists from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are expected to join the investigative efforts in Mendoza starting next week.
The outbreak on the cruise ship, MV Hondius, was attributed to the Andes hantavirus—a virus native to Argentina and Chile. It is noteworthy for being the only hantavirus believed to have the potential to spread directly between humans in certain cases.
Determining the precise path of transmission is a challenging task. Argentine officials acknowledge that it might be impossible to ascertain the exact location where the initial victims—a Dutch couple who tragically died in April—contracted the virus before embarking on the cruise from Ushuaia. Nonetheless, experts emphasize that unraveling the details of this outbreak could provide crucial insights into how this rare virus spreads and offer significant lessons for its management.
As passengers from over 20 countries have been repatriated and placed in specialized quarantine facilities, epidemiologists are scrutinizing the 11 confirmed hantavirus cases. They are also delving into the itineraries of the three individuals who succumbed to the virus, hoping to shed light on the transmission chain.
Argentine researchers are retracing the Dutch tourists’ journey, suspecting that the virus might have originated from the man’s contact with rodent droppings or urine during their extensive travels across Argentina and Chile prior to boarding the ship. The incubation period for hantavirus can range from three weeks to as long as eight weeks before symptoms manifest.
Shortly after news of the outbreak emerged, Argentina’s Health Ministry identified Ushuaia as a possible source of the contagion and last month sent investigators from the Malbran government research institute to collect rodent samples in various wooded areas around the city.
Local authorities in the tourism-dependent city of Ushuaia, famed for its location at “the end of the world,” have angrily disputed that the virus originated there. While the Andes hantavirus infects a few dozen people every year in the Patagonian region of Argentina further north, it has never been detected in Ushuaia or the wider archipelago of Tierra del Fuego.
The Health Ministry said Friday that it’s still awaiting lab results from those tests to determine whether the couple contracted the virus there.
On Friday, the ministry said specialists from Malbran, together with U.S. counterparts at the CDC, were preparing to test rodents for the hantavirus in the city of Malargüe, Mendoza from June 8-12.
A spokesperson for the Malbran Institute confirmed that the Dutch couple visited Malargüe as they drove through the winemaking region of Mendoza to the northeastern province of Misiones during the last leg of their trip in Argentina.
The head of Malbran, Claudia Perandones, met with CDC investigators in Argentina on Friday to discuss the operation, which she said would involve teams in extensive protective equipment taking blood samples from dead rodents and transferring the material to the main laboratory in Buenos Aires for testing. Authorities have said test results could take up to a month.
The World Health Organization has made clear that, given the low risk of transmission, the hantavirus will not become a pandemic threat.
Still, the Andes hantavirus has raised concerns around the world due to its mortality rate, as high as 30%, and the current lack of treatment and vaccines.
