MedPage Today The lack of coordination between CDC and WHO holds sobering lessons. Like many of you, I was deeply troubled when, on May 3, news broke that three people had died of a probable hantavirus infection and others had fallen ill on the MV Hondius, a Dutch-flagged Arctic-expedition vessel with the amenities of a four-star hotel. The outbreak occurred while the ship was traveling from Argentina to Cape Verde.
Two of the people who perished were a husband and wife from the Netherlands, ages 70 and 69. South African health officials later said the husband fell ill on the ship and passed on April 11, while his wife died in a South African hospital more than 2 weeks later. Hantavirus? I scratched my head as the facts sketchily emerged, recalling that members of the family of two dozen potentially deadly pathogens are almost always contracted by inhaling aerosolized excreta of infected rodents. Here in the U.S., our leading nemesis is the Sin Nombre virus, which I described in detail in a 2024 MedPage Today column. That pathogen was first identified following a 1993 outbreak of a rapidly progressive respiratory illness followed by shock and non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema that killed 52% of 106 initial patients (many of whom were previously healthy young adults) in the Four Corners region of New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah.