Health workers in protective gear arrive to evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026.
Mispar Apavu/AP
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Mispar Apavu/AP
MADRID – Spanish authorities were preparing Friday to receive more than 140 passengers and crew members on a hantavirus-stricken cruise ship headed for the Canary Islands, where health authorities have said they will carry out a careful evacuation.
The ship is expected to reach the Spanish island of Teneriffe, off the coast of West Africa, on Saturday or Sunday.
“They will arrive in a completely isolated, surrounded area,” Virginia Barcones, the head of Spain’s emergency services, said on Thursday.
The MV Hondius is a Dutch-flagged ship and Dutch officials said on Friday they were also in close contact with the ship’s owner and authorities of the countries whose citizens are on board.
Barcos said the United States has agreed to send a plane to the Canary Islands to bring back 17 of its citizens from the cruise ship. The British government also said it would charter an aircraft to evacuate about two dozen British citizens who were on board the ship.
At least three passengers have died and several others are ill. The World Health Organization considers the risk to the wider public from this outbreak to be low.
Hantaviruses are typically spread by inhalation of contaminated rodent droppings and are not easily transmitted between people. Symptoms usually appear between one and eight weeks after exposure.
Netherlands-based Oceanwide Expeditions cruise ship company said Thursday that none of the remaining passengers or crew on the ship currently have symptoms.
Countries are struggling to track disembarked passengers
Health officials on four continents were continuing to trace and monitor passengers who disembarked from the ship before the deadly outbreak was discovered. They are also trying to trace other people who may have come in contact with him since then.
The ship’s operator and Dutch officials said Thursday that on April 24, nearly two weeks after the death of the first passenger on board, more than two dozen people from at least 12 different countries abandoned ship without contact tracing.
The World Health Organization said that as of May 2, health officials had not confirmed hantavirus in a ship passenger for the first time.
WHO confirmed on Friday that a flight attendant on a plane briefly boarded by an infected cruise passenger in South Africa had tested negative for hantavirus.
The KLM flight attendant was working on a flight from Johannesburg to Amsterdam on April 25 and later fell ill. He was taken to an isolation ward at an Amsterdam hospital on Thursday.
The cruise passenger, a Dutch woman whose husband had died on the ship, was too ill to take an international flight to Europe and was deplaned to Johannesburg, where she died.
The Dutch Public Health Service is currently working to trace passengers on the flight who had contact with the sick woman before leaving the plane.
On Friday, UK health officials said a third British citizen is suspected of having hantavirus.
The UK Health Protection Agency said the suspected case is on Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory in the South Atlantic, where the ship docked in April.
There was no information about the person’s condition.
Two other Britons aboard the ship have been confirmed to have the virus. One is admitted in hospital in Netherlands and the other in South Africa.
Authorities in South Africa are working to trace contacts of passengers who disembarked from the first plane. They have focused primarily on an April 25 flight from the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic to Johannesburg, the day after passengers disembarked on the island.
