A hospital in the Dutch city of Nijmegen has placed twelve of its own medical staff into a six-week quarantine after blood and urine samples from a hantavirus patient were processed without the maximum level of safety procedures.
Key Takeaways:
- Twelve Radboudumc staff face a six-week quarantine after lab samples were handled under standard — rather than maximum — biosafety procedures.
- The WHO now counts nine confirmed hantavirus cases linked to the cruise ship Hondius, plus two suspected cases and three deaths.
- Health authorities stress the situation is not comparable to COVID-19, since hantavirus rarely passes between people.
The Radboudumc facility called the step purely precautionary, insisting the chance of any actual infection among the team is very low and that day-to-day patient care has not been disrupted.
The incident shows how difficult it is to switch hospitals over to a tougher rulebook on short notice, particularly when the pathogen involved is the same strain tied to the outbreak aboard the luxury cruise ship Hondius. The patient at the heart of the Nijmegen case was a passenger from that voyage, admitted on May 7.
Speaking to the Dutch parliament, Health Minister Sophie Hermans explained what went wrong. “What happened … is that strict procedures were followed, but not the very strictest procedures that apply in cases involving this hantavirus,” she said. “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.”
She drew a sharp line between the current scare and the early days of the pandemic. “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 told lawmakers.
The cluster grows, but slowly
The World Health Organization lifted its confirmed case count to nine, two higher than the day before. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said additional patients are likely given how long the virus can lie dormant before symptoms appear, but he was clear that this is not a pandemic and bears no resemblance to COVID-19. Hantavirus can kill, yet it rarely jumps from one person to another.
So far, three people have died since the outbreak began: a Dutch couple and a German citizen. The virus is normally carried by wild rodents, with human-to-human transmission limited to rare cases of very close contact.
On top of the nine confirmed infections, the WHO is tracking two suspected ones — a patient who died before testing could be done, and another on Tristan da Cunha, a remote island in the South Atlantic where no tests are available. Every known case so far appears to have picked up the virus during the cruise or just before boarding. Tedros said all suspected patients have been isolated and are receiving close medical supervision to cut off any chain of transmission.
“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,” he said. Tedros noted that passengers had spent considerable time mingling on board before anyone knew the virus was present.
The ship sails home
The Hondius itself left Spain’s Canary Islands on Monday evening, after the last of its passengers had stepped off. Twenty-five crew members along with a doctor and a nurse remain on board for the journey north. Ship owner Oceanwide Expeditions expects the vessel to dock in the Netherlands by May 17.
Tedros said authorities have managed to locate every passenger who disembarked at earlier points in the cruise, and that each country now bears responsibility for stopping any onward spread.
A trial run for post-COVID cooperation
Italy’s leading infectious diseases hospital announced it will analyse biological samples from a man who had been near the Dutch woman who died of hantavirus, making him the latest potential case to enter the international tracking system.
Arnaud Fontanet, head of Epidemiology of Emerging Diseases at France’s Pasteur Institute, told Reuters that the search for new patients could stretch on for months because the incubation window runs up to six weeks. Even so, he expects no more than a few dozen additional cases overall, given how poorly the virus transmits between humans. For him, the outbreak doubles as an exercise: “is a good way for us to try to test all that has been done since COVID-19,” to see whether the channels of international coordination actually work.
Spain confirmed on Monday night that one of its nationals had tested positive, part of a group of fourteen people quarantining at a military hospital in Madrid. The thirteen others returned negative results on Tuesday. A French passenger who tested positive after the ship reached the Canary Islands on Sunday is in intensive care but stable.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said eighteen Hondius passengers had been flown back to the United States and put into quarantine. One of them, who returned a weakly positive test, is now in a biocontainment unit in Nebraska.
Written by Vytautas Valinskas
