90-Second Read: Hantavirus: what happens when countries walk away from WHO

The Dutch cruise ship has been at the centre of a Hantavirus outbreak that has claimed the lives of three people and left eight confirmed cases so far. The health minister accused the UN leader of politicising the Hantavirus outbreak and reaffirmed his country's decision to leave. Against this backdrop, the Hantavirus may become a litmus test for the organisation as it raises a fundamental question about what international health cooperation looks like when the institutions designed to facilitate it are called into question. As the World Health Assembly this week marks the WHO exits of the United States and Argentina, a deadly outbreak at sea raises questions about whether international health cooperation can hold despite political fractures.

Tedros' calls to Argentina to reconsider its withdrawal, drawing explicit links to the Hantavirus, did not land well in Buenos Aires. Hantavirus is a rare rodent-borne disease endemic to South America, with at most a few dozen cases a year. The Andes strain, circulating in Patagonia and the one behind the cruise ship cluster, has a fatality rate of up to 30 per cent, though cases of human-to-human transmission are even rarer. Just a few weeks before, on 17 March, Argentina hit its one-year threshold after announcing it was leaving the WHO, following in the US footsteps.

The World Health Organization (WHO) director general, Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus, was on the ground personally to oversee the operations. As signalled in a letter to residents of Tenerife, Tedros wanted to reassure the public and counter disinformation spreading about the outbreak. That is the WHO's role precisely, an information broker between countries party to the International Health Regulations, which requires them to flag these types of events. The WHO arranged for Argentina to send 2,500 diagnostic kits to five European countries.

Even so, a media storm has fuelled speculations of another Covid-19, including a wave of finger-pointing reminiscent of the pandemic. The US Centers for Disease Control has reportedly also been involved, given that a number of the passengers were American citizens. Leandro Cahn, executive director of Fundación Huésped, an NGO in Buenos Aires focusing on HIV and community health, says the government is caught in a contradiction.