The Ministry of Health has activated "active surveillance" on four passengers who were on board a connecting KLM flight to Rome. A woman who had been on board the MV Hondius for a few minutes had boarded the flight, and was later hospitalized in Johannesburg, where she died from Hantavirus.
The contact details of the four, a statement emphasizes, have been acquired and the information forwarded to the relevant regions: Calabria, Campania, Tuscany, and Veneto , so that surveillance could be activated "with the utmost caution."
The risk of contagion, however, is very low, the ministry specifies : "The assessments shared internationally by the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control currently indicate a low risk for the general population worldwide and very low in Europe."
Meanwhile, the Director-General of the World Health Organization arrived in Spain today, bound for the Canary Islands, where he will oversee the evacuation of the cruise ship at the center of the hantavirus outbreak . "I have arrived in Spain, where I will join senior government officials on a mission to Tenerife to oversee the safe disembarkation of passengers, crew members, and health experts from the cruise ship MV Hondius," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told X, adding that "there are currently no other people on board with symptoms of hantavirus."
The ship's passengers will disembark today in the Canary Islands, and repatriation flights to the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, Ireland, and the Netherlands have already been scheduled. According to a statement from the Spanish Interior Minister, for passengers from "non-EU countries that do not have air connections for the repatriation of their citizens," the Spanish authorities are "preparing a plan in coordination with the Netherlands, the ship's owner, and the ship's insurance company."
(Unioneonline)