Pestory: The Hantavirus cruise and a virus contained
By Michael Moran
Too soon? Is the hantavirus outbreak aboard a Dutch expedition cruise ship MV Hondius far enough in the rearview mirror for us to talk turkey about rats? This blog, after all, proports to be about pests and history, and a viral outbreak where exposed humans are still in quarantine is stretching the definition of history.
But, well, I’m a journalist at heart, and journalism has famously been described as the “first rough draft of history.” So here’s my rough draft of the hantavirus outbreak, and its implications for those of us in who count rodent control as one of life’s missions.
Let’s start with a quick rundown of what investigators have pieced together so far, how the disease is moving between people, and where this outbreak fits in the recent history of an otherwise very rare illness.
What we know about the cause
The cluster that turned a pretty cool cruise into an epidemiological nightmare was first reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) on 2 May 2026, after passengers and crew aboard the liner began developing severe respiratory illness in the South Atlantic. The ship departed from Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1 and visited remote areas including Antarctica, South Georgia Island, Tristan da Cunha, Saint Helena and Ascension Island. The ship carried 147 passengers and crew from 23 countries. As of May 12, 11 cases (nine confirmed and two suspected) and three deaths had been reported.
On May 6, 2026, WHO confirmed that the type of hantavirus responsible for this outbreak is the Andes virus — a strain endemic to parts of Argentina and Chile and carried mainly by the long-tailed pygmy rice rat. Investigators believe the virus boarded with the passengers rather than the ship. On 6 May, the Argentine health ministry published a report detailing the movements of the index case, the Dutch citizen who presented the first symptoms, prior to the ship’s departure; the report showed he had gone on a four-month road trip between 27 November 2025 and 1 April 2026, spanning Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina. Argentine authorities are now trapping and testing rodents along that route to pin down the exposure site.
So, you’re telling yourself, I’m unlikely to visit Antarctica or encounter a long-tailed pygmy rat from South America, so I’m safe, right?
Probably true. While Hantavirus cases in Argentina have almost doubled in the past year, with the country recording 32 deaths alongside its highest number of infections since 2018, most strains of hantaviruses don’t spread between people at all. In Europe and North America, the rare instances of hantavirus causing human fatalities (most famously the case of the late actor Gene Hackman’s wife in Arizona), humans are afflicted after inhaling aerosolized particles from dried rodent urine, droppings, or saliva, and that’s the end of the chain.
So the Andes virus is the exception. Andes virus, a type of hantavirus endemic in South America, is the only type of hantavirus that is known to spread from person to person. Several other New World hantaviruses are endemic to the United States and are not transmissible from person to person.
If this does happen, however, the consequences are severe and serious. The incubation period is long and variable, which complicates contact tracing and means had the WHO and ship’s operators not been on their game, people could have been asymptomatic, flown home all over the world and touched off a real crisis. Symptoms of HPS caused by Andes virus usually appear within 4-42 days after exposure. Luckly, the early symptoms weren’t just written off and health officials acted the way we all wish they had in 2019, when the first inklings of COVID appeared in China. (We’ll get to that fiasco in a future Pestory pst). Anyway, that long incubation period is why returning passengers from the MV Hondius are being monitored in quarantine for a full 42 days even when they feel fine.
Just how rare is the virus? Outbreaks are rare enough that the major ones are individually memorable.
- Last year, of course, there was the tragic case of Gene Hackman’s wife, Betsy Arakawa, who passed away in mid-February 2025 at their Santa Fe, New Mexico home after contracting hantavirus from airborne particles of dried rodent feces or urine. That left the legendary actor whose Oscar-winning career included so many memorable performances doomed to a terrible fate of his own. Disabled and now alone in bed, Hackman died a week later of what a coroner’s report believes was a heart attack complicated by Alzheimer’s. That Southwestern strain of hantavirus, by the way, was not transferable between humans.
- In 2012, 10 people contracted the similar Sin Nombre strain after staying overnight at Yosemite National Park in California. All but one camper slept in cabins that were later found to have rodents in the wall insulation. Three of the campers died. The Yosemite cluster prompted the National Park Service to dismantle the affected tent cabins and rethink rodent inspections at rustic lodging across the country.
- South America has produced the more significant clusters of person-to-person spread: a 2018–2019 outbreak in the Patagonian town of Epuyén became the textbook case for how Andes virus moves through close contacts. Scientists learned more about human transmission after so-called “super-spreader” events in Argentina in 2018 and 2019. The events led to 34 infections and 11 deaths. The outbreak started after a person attended a birthday party for 90 minutes with a fever and muscle aches, and presumably infected five others. Another infected person attended her husband’s wake while she had a fever. Ten people who had close contact with her became ill.
- Beyond these flashpoints, Europe and Asia continue to report a steady background of cases from different hantavirus species.
- In East Asia, particularly China and the Republic of Korea, HFRS continues to account for many thousands of cases annually, although incidence has declined in recent decades — but those strains cause kidney-focused illness and have never been shown to spread between humans.
The bottom line here isn’t simple. Could the hantavirus outbreak have spread and caused a larger, pandemic-like crisis? Yes, that would have been possible. Indeed, had the ignorance, incompetence and denialism that accompanied COVID prevailed, we might all be sheltering-in-place for 42 days right now, all thanks to a long-tailed pygmy rat. So complacency when it comes to rodents is potentially deadly. But the real story – the Pestory worthy news of this tale – is about competence, expertise and transparency. The cruise ship’s owners did the right things by publishing the bad news of the outbreak and ensuring that the right global authorities were able to take steps to contain it. Sadly, some passengers died as a result, but none of this appears to have been preventable once the infected rodent had scurried on board.
But isn’t that the the cruise line’s fault? Or the port operator. Well, no. Let’s be real. Readers of this blog know how resourceful and furtive rodents can be. The idea that a cruise line is at fault for “allowing” a rodent on board is ridiculous. Maybe someday, with advanced technology (I’ll resist the remote monitoring plug here), we can prevent EVERY rodent from getting onto EVERY ship. But that day, like world peace, seems a long way off. For now, we should mourn those who died, learn the lessons, and give thanks for the competence and honesty of those who did their jobs well.
Michael Moran is CMO, Chief Risk & Sustainability Officer at Microshare. Read his bio here.