90-Second Read: The race to identify Hantavirus on a cruise ship thousands of miles away

A U.K.-based colleague had written about a passenger from a cruise ship thousands of miles away in the Atlantic Ocean who had been evacuated and admitted to a Johannesburg hospital with suspected pneumonia. Blumberg and other experts at South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases found themselves thrown into a race to identify the cause of an outbreak aboard the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius. 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.

Ascension Island health authorities had reported a cluster of illnesses on the ship that appeared to be pneumonia to the World Health Organization. Legionella is well described in outbreaks in hotels and on cruise ships, and influenza certainly is. 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. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground.

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. That pushed the South African disease experts toward another theory: the rare, rodent-borne Hantavirus infection, which is found in parts of South America. Blumberg called the head of the only laboratory in South Africa that can test for Hantavirus. While Hantavirus is not easily spread from person to person, the WHO says the Andes virus can be transmitted between people.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. An urgent message caught South African infectious disease specialist Lucille Blumberg's attention when she checked her email on the morning of May 1, while the country was celebrating the Labor Day holiday. The experts also ran an extensive panel of tests for other respiratory diseases.