Two people have tested positive for the Andes strain of the hantavirus less than a day after being evacuated from a luxury cruise ship hit by a deadly outbreak. The American and a French woman had been passengers on the MV Hondius.
The French woman developed symptoms on the repatriation flight from the Canary Islands and worsened overnight, French health minister Stéphanie Rist told France Inter radio. She is hospitalised and isolated, as are the other four French passengers.
The US department of health and human services said on Sunday that one of the 17 Americans being repatriated had tested mildly positive for the Andes strain of the virus, and a second had shown mild symptoms.
Governments are taking extensive precautions after a multi-country response to evacuate passengers from the Dutch-flagged ship at the centre of an outbreak that has left three people dead. The US update marks the first confirmed US-linked infection tied to the cruise, which public-health experts view as unlikely to cause a pandemic.
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“It’s a virus we know,” Rist said on French television late Sunday. “The incubation period is quite long and we need to break the potential chain of transmission from the start.”
The French passengers will be isolated for 42 days as France takes the strictest measures of any European Union country, according to Rist.
Two Irish people who had been on board the MV Hondius returned home on Sunday on an Air Corps plane that landed at Baldonnel military airbase in Dublin just after 9pm.
Ann Lane, a former personal assistant to former president Mary Robinson who lives in Dublin, and her friend were accompanied by Health Service Executive (HSE) medics on the flight from Tenerife.
The Department of Health said both would now “isolate for a period of time in a HSE facility, in line with European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) guidance”.
Speaking in advance of their return on Sunday night, Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers said the two passengers were “safe and well” and would be isolating and in quarantine for about five weeks.
A chartered Titan Airways flight transported a group of British passengers from the Canary Islands to Manchester Airport on Sunday evening.
Twenty British passengers, who were tested for hantavirus before getting on the flight, were taken to isolate at the UK’s initial Covid quarantine site at Arrowe Park Hospital on the Wirral, Merseyside.
One German national, who is a UK resident, and one Japanese passenger from the MV Hondius cruise ship are also being monitored at Arrowe Park.
Sunday’s return flight from Ireland to Tenerife is the first medical evacuation operation in which the Defence Forces’ recently acquired Dassault Falcon 6X aircraft has taken part since its delivery late last year.
The Defence Forces said on Sunday evening the aircraft, which was acquired in December 2025 for €53 million plus VAT, had mostly been used for ministerial transportation to date.
The hantavirus is usually spread by rodents but is also transmissible from person to person in rare cases of close contact.
The WHO said the first passenger who died on the ship may have been infected before boarding, possibly during travel in Argentina and Chile.
Spain’s health ministry on Sunday said no rodents had been detected aboard the ship.
Three people who were on board the ship have died – a Dutch couple and a German national. Four other passengers remain hospitalised in South Africa, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The passenger in South Africa is a Briton and his condition is gradually improving, a South African health ministry spokesperson said on Monday.
“The British patient is clinically improving but still ill,” the spokesperson Foster Mohale told Reuters.
On the remote Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha, a British overseas territory, a suspected case is being treated by a team of medical specialists parachuted in by the UK military. British health authorities have said a British resident of the islands, who had disembarked from the cruise ship there, was suspected of having the virus.
Still, health officials urged calm, reminding a public scarred from the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic that this virus was far less contagious and posed little risk to the general population.
A woman in Spain who was tested for the virus after sharing a flight with one of the victims tested negative.
Thirty crew members will remain on board and sail on Monday evening to the Netherlands, where the ship will be disinfected.
The final two flights to evacuate passengers from the cruise ship will depart on Monday afternoon, Spain’s health minister said on Sunday evening, adding 94 passengers had been evacuated so far.
One flight from Australia will carry six passengers and another from New Zealand will take 18 passengers, with both flights also taking passengers from other countries which did not send their own repatriation flights, officials have said. – Additional reporting: Agencies
