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Hantavirus Cruise Reaches Tenerife With Evacuations Underway

WHO calls for 42 days of monitoring for evacuees to guard against the Andes strain’s rare person-to-person spread.

Overview

  • MV Hondius, which anchored off Tenerife on Sunday, began phased disembarkation by small boats under Spanish and WHO oversight.
  • The first repatriation flights moved 14 Spanish passengers to a military hospital in Madrid for quarantine and carried a French group to Paris.
  • The U.S. government is dispatching a dedicated aircraft to evacuate 17 citizens for care and monitoring at the University of Nebraska’s biocontainment unit.
  • A Spanish court approved a compulsory 7‑day quarantine for Spanish returnees, while WHO recommends a 42‑day monitoring period for all evacuees.
  • Authorities have tied three deaths to the cluster and logged multiple confirmed and probable cases, including two in Dutch evacuees and one in a Swiss returnee, as WHO probes possible person‑to‑person spread and says the public risk remains low.