By Charlotte Van Campenhout and Victoria Waldersee
AMSTERDAM/MADRID, May 12 (Reuters) – A Dutch hospital has quarantined 12 staff members in a preventive measure after blood and urine from a hantavirus patient were handled without observing strict protocols.
The 12 will be quarantined for six weeks, the Radboudumc hospital in the city of Nijmegen said, adding that the infection risk was very low and patient care continued uninterrupted.
Quarantining of the medics illustrates the challenge of quickly introducing and implementing stricter protocols needed in hospitals and elsewhere for dealing with this strain of the hantavirus.
International medical officials are working to contain the outbreak, which hit the Hondius luxury cruise ship.
The World Health Organization increased its tally of confirmed cases in the outbreak to nine, up by two from the previous day. It said more cases could come because of the long incubation period, but that this was not a pandemic, and was nothing like COVID-19.
In the latest report of a potential case, Italy’s ANSA news agency said a 25-year-old Italian man who had flown on a KLM flight with a woman who died of hantavirus had been taken to hospital with symptoms.
The virus can be deadly, although it does not spread easily from person to person.
STRICT PROTOCOLS
The Radboudumc hospital admitted its hantavirus patient, a passenger from the cruise ship, on May 7.
“What happened … is that strict procedures were followed, but not the very strictest procedures that apply in cases involving this hantavirus,” Dutch Health Minister Sophie Hermans told parliament. “The likelihood that staff have been infected as a result is small, but because we know we are dealing with a serious virus, (the hospital) has said: we will play it safe here.”
“It really is a different situation than with COVID. With the knowledge we have and the measures we are taking, we are confident we can keep this virus under control,” Hermans said.
HONDIUS SETS SAIL FOR NETHERLANDS
After the last passengers disembarked the ship in Spain’s Canary Islands, the Hondius set sail for the Netherlands late on Monday evening with 25 crew, a doctor and a nurse. It is expected to arrive in the Netherlands by May 17, ship owner Oceanwide Expeditions said.
Two planes carrying 28 passengers and crew who left the ship in the Canary Islands arrived in the Netherlands on Tuesday, shortly after midnight. Eight are Dutch citizens; the others will continue on to their home countries, authorities have said.
Three people – a Dutch couple and a German national – have died since the start of the outbreak of the virus, which is usually spread by wild rodents but can be transmitted person-to-person in rare cases of close contact.
NINE CONFIRMED CASES
In addition to the nine confirmed cases, the WHO recognises two suspected cases – one person who died before being tested, and one on Tristan da Cunha, a remote South Atlantic island where there were no tests available.
All suspected cases have been isolated and managed under strict medical supervision, minimising any risk of further transmission, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press conference in Madrid.
Tedros warned that more cases were to be expected as there had been “a lot of interaction” between passengers before health officials detected hantavirus on a patient who had fallen ill.
“At the moment, there is no sign that we are seeing the start of a larger outbreak, but of course the situation could change and given the long incubation period of the virus, it’s possible we might see more cases in the coming weeks.”
All passengers who had disembarked the ship at earlier stages in the cruise had been located, Tedros said, adding it was up to their respective countries to implement protocols to prevent the virus from spreading.
QUARANTINED
Spain announced late on Monday that a Spaniard had tested positive, one of 14 quarantining at a military hospital in Madrid. The patient has developed a fever and breathing difficulties but was stable, the Spanish Health Ministry said on Tuesday, adding that definitive tests had confirmed negative results for the 13 others in quarantine.
The confirmed cases also include a French passenger who tested positive after the ship docked in the Canary Islands on Sunday. French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said the passenger was in intensive care but in a stable condition.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services officials said on Monday that 18 passengers from the Hondius were flown back to the U.S. and quarantined, with the one passenger who tested weakly positive now in a Nebraska biocontainment unit.
(Additional reporting by Jennifer Rigby in London, Emma Pinedo and David Latona in Madrid, Andrey Khalip in Lisbon, Bart Meijer in Amsterdam; Writing by Ingrid Melander;Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus and Peter Graff)
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