90-Second Read: How South African scientists identified Hantavirus on a cruise ship thousands of miles away

A U.K.-based colleague had written about a passenger from a cruise ship sailing thousands of miles away in the Atlantic Ocean who had been evacuated and admitted to a Johannesburg hospital with suspected pneumonia. That pushed the South African disease experts toward another theory: the rare, rodent-borne Hantavirus infection, which is found in parts of South America. Those positive tests, which also identified the Andes strain of Hantavirus, allowed the WHO to inform the cruise ship what it was dealing with and announce an outbreak on board. The colleague, who monitors diseases in remote British overseas territories in the South Atlantic Ocean, asked Blumberg to follow up on the passenger, who had been evacuated from the ship in one of the territories, Ascension Island.

The team then began looking more closely at where the ship came from, Argentina, and the fact that passengers on board were avid bird watchers and had reportedly been to parts of South America where there were birds, but also rodents. Blumberg called the head of the only laboratory in South Africa that can test for Hantavirus. This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. The elderly British man had arrived at a private hospital in Johannesburg days earlier and was seriously ill, but health workers weren't sure of the underlying cause.

When South African infectious disease specialist Lucille Blumberg checked her email on the morning of May 1, while the country was celebrating the Labor Day holiday, an urgent message caught her attention. By the time he was evacuated from the ship, two elderly Dutch passengers who had been on board the MV Hondius cruise liner had already died, but there had been little alarm. Legionella is well described in outbreaks in hotels and on cruise ships, and influenza certainly is. While Hantavirus is not easily spread from person to person, the WHO says the Andes virus can be transmitted between people.

Ascension Island health authorities had reported a cluster of illnesses on the ship that appeared to be pneumonia to the World Health Organization. At first, Blumberg and her colleagues thought it might be Legionella, a bacterium that causes a serious form of pneumonia, Legionnaires' disease. You can get onto a Zoom (call) online and ask your questions and get advice.