Hantavirus: a French woman tested positive, what protocol awaits passengers?

On Sunday May 10, the ship carrying 147 passengers and crew members representing 23 different nationalities docked in the Canaries because of a hantavirus outbreak declared on board. A day of operation was necessary to evacuate some of the passengers and crew members of the MV Hondius. In total, these operations involved 94 people of 19 different nationalities according to the Spanish Minister of Health.

According to information from BFM TV, around twenty “contact cases” of passengers on the boat where the hantavirus outbreak broke out have been identified in France. These people were not present on board the boat but crossed paths with the patients during flights taken by cruise lines at the time of repatriation. “These are the five French nationals who were on board the cruise ship, of eight people on the plane of April 25 linking the British territory of Saint Helena to Johannesburg (South Africa) and 14 people who were on board the second flight linking Johannesburg to Amsterdam (Netherlands), specifies France Info.

Invited on the France 2 set, the Minister of Health Stéphanie Rist, wanted to be reassuring regarding the possibility of a spread of l’hantavirus on French territory. On board the plane which repatriated the French passengers, a passenger evacuated from the ship showed symptoms of the virus. A test was carried out and the PCR test results came back positive. Stéphanie Rist clarified that the five cruise lines “are considered high risk” and that the government is taking “very strict measures to protect the French”. Objective ? “We must break the chains of transmission of the virus.”

For repatriated passengers, a strict protocol is required for the coming weeks. A decree was published in the Official Journal to describe the treatment: “In order to prevent any spread of Andes strain hantaviruspeople who stayed on board the ship MV Hondius between April 1, 2026 and May 10, 2026 and arrived in the national territory are placed in quarantine in a health establishment for the duration necessary to carry out a medical and epidemiological evaluation. At the end of this assessment, they are kept in quarantine or placed in isolation, to a total duration of 42 days ».

Passengers considered high-risk contact cases were transferred to a specialized unit at Bichat hospital for patients with contagious diseases. They will remain hospitalized for 72 hours, time for a complete assessment and a series of examinations. Concerning the French people who were on board the two cruise line repatriation flights, they must also respect “a home quarantine measure pending an assessment of their risk of infection, which is carried out within three days following their report”. All those affected have been contacted.

In humans, hantaviruses can be responsible infections of varying severitypotentially fatal, warns Anrs. “The first clinical symptoms are generally those of the flu: fever, headache, muscle pain.” For infected people, it is then possible to declare two different syndromes: “a hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, with a fatality rate of 0.4 to 10%”, or a “severe cardiopulmonary syndrome of sudden onset with respiratory and cardiac failure, with a fatality rate of around 30 to 60%”.

The incubation period can be longthe virus can take up to eight weeks to appear although symptoms usually appear within two weeks. A new meeting is organized by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu this Monday afternoon in Matignon to take stock of the situation.