Spain readies for evacuations as a hantavirus-hit cruise ship heads for the Canary Islands

MADRID — Spanish authorities on Friday were preparing to receive more than 140 passengers and crew members on board a hantavirus-stricken cruise ship headed for the Canary Islands, where health officials have said they will perform careful evacuations.

The vessel is expected to reach the Spanish island of Tenerife, off the coast of West Africa, on Saturday or Sunday.

• Canadian consular officials head to Canary Islands to meet hantavirus cruise ship
• Worried about hantavirus? Take precautions when opening cottages, sheds, PHAC expert advises

“They 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 onboard.

At least three passengers have died, and several other people are sick. The World Health Organization considers the risk to the wider public from the outbreak as low, and on Friday, confirmed that a flight attendant on a plane briefly boarded by an infected cruise passenger had tested negative for hantavirus.

Her possible infection had raised concerns about the virus’s potential transmissibility.

Hantavirus is usually spread by the inhalation of contaminated rodent droppings and isn’t easily transmitted between people. Symptoms usually show between one and eight weeks after exposure.

None of the remaining passengers or crew on the ship is currently symptomatic, the Netherlands-based Oceanwide Expeditions cruise ship company said Thursday.

Countries scramble to track passengers who disembarked

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.

• Government says 3 Canadians isolating at home after hantavirus ship outbreak
• People on hantavirus ship ate every meal ‘side by side,’ even after first death, passenger says

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 that flight — a Dutch woman whose husband died on the ship — was too ill to stay on the international flight to Europe and was taken off the plane in Johannesburg, where she died.

The Dutch public health service is currently undertaking contract tracing on passengers from the flight who had contact with the ill woman before she left the plane.

On Friday, U.K. health authorities said a third British national is suspected to have the hantavirus.

The U.K. Health Security Agency said the suspected case is on Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory in the south Atlantic where the ship stopped in April.

There was no word on the person’s condition.

Two other Britons who were on the ship have been confirmed to have the virus. One is hospitalized in the Netherlands and the other in South Africa.

Authorities in South Africa are working to trace contacts of any passengers who previously got off the ship. They have focused mainly on an April 25 flight from the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic to Johannesburg, the day after some passengers disembarked on the island.

___

Suman Naishadham, The Associated Press

Associated Press writer Molly Quell in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed.