90-Second Read: The Ebola and Hantavirus outbreaks warn us we must be better prepared if we are to prevent the next pandemic

The Hantavirus outbreak on a cruise expedition in the south Atlantic played out slowly. Three weeks passed between the death of one passenger on 11 April and the linkage to Hantavirus on 2 May. An Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention report last Friday cited 65 deaths and more than 260 cases of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, concentrated in the remote province of Ituri, bordering Uganda and South Sudan. Communities there endured two years of the DRC's worst Ebola outbreak yet, which ended only in 2020.

Andes Hantavirus transmits between people through close contact, as a 2018 outbreak demonstrated when an infected man passed the virus to four people sharing his table, and another during a brief greeting. When a passenger on a cruise departing Ushuaia develops acute respiratory illness, Hantavirus must be a consideration. Based on what we know, both outbreaks carry a 32% case fatality rate. In that time, passengers onboard the MV Hondius continued their itinerary, having been advised that the man had probably died of natural causes.

As it is endemic in the DRC, Ebola is usually picked up early, even one or two deaths have been notified to the WHO. Identifying disease and responding under these circumstances is a huge challenge, and national and international support is essential for early detection and preparedness in the world's most vulnerable settings. For both of these, predicting and acting on known risks could have saved lives and prevented international health crises. The question is not whether we can afford smarter surveillance and risk-informed preparedness, it is whether we can afford to ignore the warning signs of climate, biodiversity loss and disease patterns which are right in front of us if we are alert to them.

More than 30 passengers disembarked at St Helena and flew in different directions. In a country with a long and painful history of Ebola, a haemorrhagic fever cluster should be treated as potentially the disease until definitively proven otherwise. Ituri is a region already vulnerable due to conflict and successive health crises.