INA-Follow-up
French authorities said on Thursday that 26 people who had been in contact with Hantavirus patients linked to the cruise ship MV Hondius tested negative for the disease.
Dutch authorities also said that all people who arrived in the Netherlands aboard evacuation flights from the ship earlier this week tested negative.
Twenty-six people are currently being isolated in hospitals in France, including 22 identified as close contacts of a Dutch woman infected with Hantavirus who had been aboard the cruise ship at the center of an international alert over the rare disease, which is usually transmitted by rodents.
French doctors are also monitoring four others who were on board the vessel, while a fifth French passenger infected with Hantavirus remains in critical condition at a French hospital.
The 22 individuals currently isolated in France had been aboard a flight from Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean to Johannesburg, or on a separate flight from Johannesburg to Amsterdam that had been due to carry the Dutch passenger, who was removed from the plane and later died in a hospital in South Africa.
Globally, three people infected with Hantavirus have died, while six confirmed cases and one probable case have been recorded.
A U.S. citizen who had been among the passengers aboard the MV Hondius and initially tested positive for hantavirus despite showing no symptoms later tested negative, according to U.S. health authorities cited by Agence France-Presse.
The American passenger had initially been placed under observation in a biological containment unit after a preliminary positive test that U.S. medical staff later deemed inconclusive.
Health authorities stressed that the risk to the general public remains low.
