Donald Trump is saying he has been briefed on the recent outbreak of the Andes hantavirus on a Dutch cruise ship, and, reminiscent of what he had to say in 2020 about COVID, he is trying to downplay any concerns about possible disease spread, telling reporters that the situation is “under control.”
“We have a lot of people, a lot of great people, studying it. It should be fine, we hope,” Trump said.
Reassured?
Didn’t think so.
Three people from the ship have died at this writing in the hantavirus outbreak – the Patient Zero is suspected to be ornithologist Leo Schilperoord, who we now know had visited an Argentinian landfill with his wife, Mirjam, on March 27 in search of a rare creature — the white-throated caracara.
The landfill in Ushuaia, Argentina, a resort town on the southern tip of the South American continent known as “the End of the World,” is where authorities suspect the couple inhaled particles from the feces of long-tailed pygmy rice rate, which carry the Andes strain of the hantavirus, the only form of the virus known to transmit from human to human.
The couple boarded the cruise on April 1; on April 6, Leo reported having a fever, headache, stomach pain and diarrhea.
He died on the ship five days later.
Mirjam remained on the ship with her husband’s body until disembarking on April 24 during a planned stop on the Atlantic island of Santa Helena, from where she flew to South Africa with plans to make a connecting flight back home to the Netherlands.
The flight crew found her too sick to fly and removed her from the plane; she collapsed at the airport and died the next day.
Are we at risk?
A Virginia Tech scientist said the outbreak underscores how little scientists still know about the viruses circulating silently in wild rodent populations before they spill into humans.
“Viruses with the ability to infect multiple species and spread silently between people deserve serious attention before outbreaks grow larger,” said Luis Escobar, a disease ecologist who is member of the school’s Pandemic Prediction and Prevention Destination Area.
Escobar said hantaviruses from Europe and Asia tend to remain more closely tied to their original rodent hosts, which limits their ability to spread more widely.
“Variants in the Americas show greater ecological plasticity, meaning rodents can transmit the virus across a broader range of species. This biological flexibility is a major warning sign for disease emergence,” Escobar said.
Like COVID, hantaviruses “can produce asymptomatic or mild infections in addition to severe illness, but it is unclear the potential role of silent infections in disease spread. Because hospitalization data only captures the most severe cases, the true size of an outbreak is often underestimated,” Escobar said.
The mortality rate associated with hantaviruses “is significantly higher than COVID-19,” Escobar said, noting that in Chile, “mortality among hospitalized patients can approach 60 percent.”
“That means rapid containment is essential,” Escobar said. “The earlier outbreaks are identified and controlled, the better the outcome for global public health.”
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Chris Graham
