GENEVA (AFP): The World Health Organization said Saturday it considered everyone on board a cruise ship hit with a deadly hantavirus outbreak as "high-risk" contacts who should be actively monitored for 42 days.
There are nearly 150 people on board the MV Hondius at the centre of the outbreak that has killed three people, which is heading towards the waters off Tenerife.
"We classify everybody on board as what we call a high-risk contact," WHO's epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention director Maria Van Kerkhove told a social media event.
Currently, "there's nobody on board that has any symptoms", she said, adding though that "active monitoring and follow-up of all the passengers and crew who disembark for a 42-day period" was recommended.
Van Kerkove stressed that the risk to the general public and to the people of the Canary Islands, where the Hondius is expected to anchor on Sunday, remained "low".
Three passengers from the ship -- a Dutch husband and wife and a German woman -- have died, out of eight confirmed and suspected cases of the rare disease, which usually spreads among rodents.
The only hantavirus type that can transmit from person to person -- the Andes virus -- has been confirmed among the six cases who have tested positive, fuelling international concern.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is heading to Tenerife to help coordinate the evacuation.
Van Kerkhove said the United Nations health agency was coordinating with member states -- in particular Spain and the Netherlands, the ship's operator, and experts around the world on the best way forward.
On Saturday, WHO had briefed countries with nationals on board the ship about the plans for "safe and dignified disembarkment", she said.
The idea, she said, was for anyone who might be showing symptoms to "immediately go to a medical evacuation plane and be taken to the Netherlands for care".
Countries were organising planes to take all those without symptoms back home, with some countries, like the United States and Canada, discussing sharing a plane, Van Kerkhove said.
Everyone coming off the ship would meanwhile need to be monitored for 42 days, starting from their last point of exposure with a confirmed or suspected hantavirus case, she said.
That means, she said, "the clock has already started ticking". -- AFP
