French citizen, who was transported to her homeland over the weekend from the cruise ship MV Hondius, where the deadly hantavirus spread, on Tuesday they transferred him to the intensive care unit and connected him to artificial pulmonary ventilation. This was stated by Xavier Lescure, a specialist in infectious diseases at the Bichat-Claude-Bernard hospital in Paris, according to whom the woman older than 65 years, she also has other health problems and suffers from the most severe form of the disease affecting the lungs. TASR informs about it with reference to the AFP agency.
The patient is one of five French citizens who were placed in isolation after returning from the ship. On Sunday evening, she started to feel very ill and the test confirmed that she was infected with hantavirus. Humans can become infected with hantavirus through contact with rodents such as rats and mice, especially their urine, droppings and saliva. Said France suffers from Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS), a potentially fatal disease that affects the lungs.
Symptoms of HPS – fatigue, fever or muscle aches – usually start to appear one to eight weeks after contact with an infected rodent. The disease is caused by the strain of Andes hantavirus, which is the only one that can be proven to be transmitted from person to person. At the same time, the French authorities have identified 22 persons with whom potential carriers of the virus may have met. Health Minister Stéphanie Rist said that all these people have been “contacted, tested, hospitalized and are under strict supervision”.
French President Emmanuel In response to the current situation, Macron declared that the hantavirus is “under control” in France. At the Africa Forward summit in Kenya on Tuesday, he said that the government took the right decisions and introduced “extremely strict rules”.
Dutch authorities announced on Tuesday that all 26 passengers who arrived in the Netherlands on the first evacuation flight on Sunday evening had tested negative for hantavirus. This was announced by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), according to which samples were taken from everyone at the airport for laboratory testing. Despite a negative test, they must remain in quarantine. Later, two more repatriation flights landed in the Netherlands with 28 evacuees, who will also go into quarantine.
Hantavirus is especially endemic in Argentina, where the ship sailed from in April. There is no vaccine or specific treatment against it. So far, three passengers have died as a result of the infection – a married couple from the Netherlands and a citizen of Germany. Olivier Schwartz, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, said on Tuesday that two samples of the virus had been sequenced so far – one in Zurich and one in Paris. So far, according to him, no fundamental differences have been detected between them, nor is there any evidence that the virus has mutated.
The newspaper Le Figaro wrote on Tuesday that dutch couple who sailed on the MV Hondius, visited a waste dump in Argentina, where he wanted to admire the rare white-necked caracara bird (Phalcoboenus albogularis). Experienced ornithologists know that they can be found in a dump near the city of Ushuaia, from where the ship set out on its voyage. This bird also feeds on carrion and small vertebrates.
