Buenos Aires, Argentina – Health authorities around the world are monitoring passengers repatriated from a cruise ship that left Argentina’s Ushuaia port after an outbreak of the deadly hantavirus, a rarer and more dangerous strain endemic to southern Argentina and Chile’s Patagonia region, gained attention.
Three passengers, including a Dutch couple and a German woman, died after the MV Hondius sailed to the Tierra del Fuego province on April 1, while investigators attempted to determine where the infection first occurred.
Two of the deaths have been officially confirmed to be hantavirus cases. This disease is present in many countries around the world (including the United States) and is most commonly spread by inhaling aerosol particles from rodent urine, feces, or saliva.
However, the Andean variant is the only one for which human-to-human transmission has been documented. As international concern surrounding the outbreak grew with newly confirmed cases, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus sought to reassure the public, emphasizing that the outbreak was “not the beginning of the COVID pandemic.”
Argentine health officials and infectious disease experts are currently focusing on the routes of travelers passing through southern regions of Argentina and Chile, where this strain is endemic.
“Infected people can transmit the virus to others already in the early stages of symptoms, which makes the situation on board the ship very complicated,” said Hugo Fitch, an infectious disease expert at the University of Córdoba in Argentina. Argentina Report.
Pizzi participated in the investigation of the 2018 outbreak in Epuyen, in the southern Chubut province. There, Argentine researchers first documented the chain of human transmission associated with the Andean variant after more than 30 infections were reported.
The first international report, citing anonymous sources, suggested that passengers on the cruise may have been infected near a garbage dump in Ushuaia, the capital of Tierra del Fuego state. However, according to Ministry of Health records, the Andean strain identified in the investigation “has been distributed only in Chubut, Río Negro, Neuquén, and southern Chile,” not in Tierra del Fuego state.
Health authorities are currently reconstructing the movements of Dutch tourists believed to be index cases. According to the Ministry of Health report: Argentina ReportThe traveler arrived in Argentina in November 2025 and traveled through Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay for about four months before boarding a cruise ship in Ushuaia on April 1.
His itinerary included a trip through southern Chile and the Neuquén region, home to the endemic Andean variety.
Meanwhile, investigators from the Malvran Institute are conducting rodent sampling and disease tracking activities, focusing on areas visited by passengers before arriving in Ushuaia.
According to official reports, authorities are monitoring close contacts who may have been in contact with infected passengers on the first day symptoms appeared, a period researchers consider critical for potential transmission.
Meanwhile, Rio Negro regional authorities confirmed a separate hantavirus case involving a 45-year-old patient hospitalized in Bariloche.
the official said Argentina Report The patient is under intensive monitoring and close contacts are under precautionary quarantine. Authorities emphasized that at the time this article was published, the case had no epidemiological link to the Cruze outbreak.
The key question for investigators now is where the infection first occurred during the four-month journey through some of South America’s most remote and endemic regions.
Main image source: Argentina Ministry of Health website.
