Sawt Falasteen - Virus-hit cruise ship heads for Spain as evacuees land in Europe

The fate of the MV Hondius has sparked international alarm after three people travelling on the ship died, though World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus insisted the outbreak was not comparable to the Covid pandemic.

One passenger, Ruhi Cenet, a 35-year-old Turkish travel vlogger, said what started out as an idyllic voyage turned chaotic when the ship's captain announced on April 12 that a passenger had died.

"He said it was due to natural causes," Cenet told AFP.

"They didn't even consider the possibility of having such a contagious disease," he added. "They didn't take the problem seriously enough."

The WHO said emergency crews evacuated three people -- two sick crew members and another person who had been in contact with one of the confirmed cases -- from the ship Wednesday, which later left its anchorage off Cape Verde and headed for Spain's Canary Islands.

After being taken from the ship to an ambulance boat by medical personnel in hazmat suits, the three evacuees later boarded flights at the airport in Cape Verde's capital Praia.

A medical plane carrying two evacuated passengers landed at Amsterdam Airport in the Netherlands at 1747 GMT, according to AFP reporters at the scene.

German emergency services said they had picked up one evacuee in Amsterdam who came into contact with an infected person on board the ship, and were transporting the individual to a hospital in Dusseldorf.

Another medical plane landed at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands earlier Wednesday, an AFP journalist there saw.

Spanish officials said that plane had landed because of a "broken isolation bubble". Spain's health ministry said a new plane would be needed to travel on to the Netherlands.

- Low global risk: WHO -

Experts confirmed the version of the virus detected aboard the Hondius was a rare strain known as the Andes virus, the only one that can be transmitted between humans.

The first person to have the virus on the ship could not have been infected during the cruise, given the one- to six-week incubation period, WHO expert Anais Legand told AFP.

The ship left Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1, and the first death occurred on April 11.

Argentine officials said the first couple killed had visited Chile, Uruguay and Argentina before the cruise.

They said experts would travel to Ushuaia to test rodents there for hantavirus.

Argentina has seen an increase in hantavirus cases, but not an outbreak, expert Raul Gonzalez Ittig told AFP.

Health officials played down fears of a wider global outbreak from the virus, which is less contagious than Covid.

UN health agency chief Tedros told AFP it was not like the Covid-19 pandemic, adding: "The risk to the rest of the world is low."

The ship has been at the centre of an international health scare since Saturday, when the WHO was informed that three passengers had died and the suspected cause was hantavirus.

The rare respiratory disease is usually spread from infected rodents, typically through urine, droppings and saliva.

A Dutch man died on board on April 11, and his wife, who left the ship to accompany his body to South Africa, died there 15 days later after also falling ill.

Two other people are still being treated -- one in Johannesburg and one in the Swiss city of Zurich.

Two people who returned to the UK from the ship have been advised to self-isolate, the UK Health Security Agency said, adding they were asymptomatic and insisting the risk to the public was "very low".

Spanish Health Minister Monica Garcia Gomez said the vessel would dock within the next three days in Tenerife, in the Canaries, and all foreign passengers would be flown back to their home countries from there if their health allowed.

- Contact tracing -

The Dutch woman who died had flown on a commercial plane from the island of Saint Helena to Johannesburg while she was showing symptoms.

Fuelling fears of further contact, Dutch airline KLM said on Wednesday that one of the people who died from the virus had been "briefly" on its flight from Johannesburg to the Netherlands on April 25, but was removed before take-off.

The cruise ship originally counted 88 passengers and 59 crew, with 23 nationalities on board.

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