How public health officials are tracing contacts of hantavirus victims
NEW YORK (AP) — Hantaviruses don’t spread easily between people, making health officials confident the recent outbreak on a cruise ship that killed three people will not turn into an epidemic.
But they still have to make sure of it. Health officials in several countries are therefore conducting contact tracing: trying to identify and track people who may have been in contact with passengers who have fallen ill or died.
Hantaviruses are typically spread when people inhale contaminated residue from rodent droppings. Although human cases are rare, small outbreaks have been documented around the world. But the Andes virus involved in the cruise ship outbreak could, in rare cases, spread between people. And viruses can change.
Scientists are trying to learn more about the virus as quickly as possible, including whether it has mutated and how exactly it is spreading.
What is contact tracing?
The goal of contact tracing is to alert people who may have been exposed, monitor them in case they have symptoms, and prevent them from spreading it to others.
The process is not easy because people are social and mobile creatures who spend time with others, visit busy places, and travel.
In the cruise ship-related outbreak, fewer than a dozen people were reported to have had symptoms, and there were only five confirmed cases, but many more may have been exposed.
Dozens of potentially exposed passengers have already left the ship
About 140 people remain on the cruise ship headed to the Canary Islands, where they will disembark, and none have been reported ill.
But authorities are trying to reach dozens of people who left the ship about two weeks after a passenger died, but before authorities knew a hantavirus was the culprit. They came from at least 12 different countries, including several U.S. states including Arizona, California, Georgia and Texas, according to infectious disease experts and state public health officials.
Different countries take different approaches
Authorities in St Helena – the isolated volcanic British territory in the South Atlantic from where the passengers disembarked – said they were monitoring a small number of people considered “high-risk contacts”. They were told to self-isolate for 45 days, the St Helena government said.
British health officials said two people who were passengers on the ship but returned home halfway through the journey are self-isolating but have no symptoms. Britain’s Health Security Agency said “a small number” of contacts of the two men are also self-isolating but have no symptoms.
Singapore health authorities said they were monitoring two men who landed in St Helena and flew to South Africa and then home. The two men, who arrived in Singapore at different times, were tested for hantavirus and were isolated at the country’s National Center for Infectious Diseases, officials said.
The U.S. government has released few details about its work on contact tracing.
Texas officials said Thursday that public health officials contacted the two people who left the ship on April 24, who say they had no symptoms and had no contact with a sick person on board. They promised to monitor themselves by taking their temperatures daily and to contact public health officials at any sign of possible illness, officials said.
Two Canadians who landed are in Ontario and have been advised to self-isolate since returning home, the province’s health minister said.
Scientists are trying to better understand the Andean virus
Besides tracking people, scientists are also trying to understand the germ. Andes virus, a member of the hantavirus family found in South America, may be one of the few hantaviruses that can spread between people. Argentine authorities believe the first cases may have been contracted during a bird-watching trip to the southern city of Ushuaia.
Argentina’s Health Ministry has not yet sent the team, but scientists from the state-funded Malbrán Institute plan to travel to Ushuaia “in the coming days,” the ministry told The Associated Press.
Scientists are analyzing the virus’s genetics to see if they have changed in a way that makes it more transmissible.
They’re also trying to understand exactly how the virus spreads, said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, executive director of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. They believe that people are primarily contagious when they have symptoms, and that if the virus spreads, it can be transmitted by small liquid particles that escape from an infected person when they speak, cough or sneeze. ___
AP journalists Isabel Debre in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Gerald Imray in Cape Town, South Africa; Rob Gillies in Toronto; Jill Lawless in London; Suman Naishadham in Madrid; and Jamie Stengle in Dallas contributed.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
