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| Hello. |
The incompetence will wipe us out again. The World Health Organization warns the hantavirus is spreading and they can't trace its origins.
Hantavirus is a group of viruses spread by rodents, causing severe respiratory illness (Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome or HPS) or kidney disease, with infection occurring through inhaling aerosolized urine, droppings, or saliva. Symptoms include fever, fatigue, and muscle aches, progressing to shortness of breath and fluid in the lungs in severe cases, requiring early medical care, often with supportive measures like oxygen therapy. Prevention focuses on rodent control and safe cleanup of rodent-infested areas.
Trump on Hantavirus: We should be fine.
— Acyn (@Acyn) May 8, 2026
Reporter: Should Americans be concerned that it’s going to spread?
Trump: I hope not. pic.twitter.com/dks4sTZRDT
🚨 JUST IN: President Trump says he has been BRIEFED on the hantavirus situation, but does NOT believe Americans should be concerned
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) May 8, 2026
"We have a lot of great people studying it. It should be fine, we hope."
"It's very much, we hope, under control. We're gonna make a full report… pic.twitter.com/OmyP3ngkS9
President Donald J. Trump pulled out of the WHO in early 2025 with claims it didn't punish China or support Israel as it is causing genocides in Gaza and Lebanon.
We are going to be fucked again by the late preparation and this incompetent Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
What to expect if the U.S. does have confirm cases!
The president downplaying it as just a minor isolated incident.
Once it starts, we will be driven by the rhetoric of the junk food media to say its not dangerous and we can carry on with our lives. But once it starts spreading and taking out its first casualties, we will have panic buying and hoarding.
Eventually the WHO will declare a global pandemic.
Under the first Trump Administration, we were ordered lockdowns and restrictive travel.
The second Trump Administration, we will not have the opportunity to be prepared for the potential chaos that could happen.
Two Georgia cruise passengers were on board the ship that left Argentina but got quarantined near Cape Verde.
The Dutch-flagged cruise ship MV Hondius is currently quarantined off Cape Verde in the Atlantic Ocean following a deadly hantavirus outbreak that has killed three passengers and sickened several others. Roughly 150 passengers are confined to cabins, with experts warning of a potential eight-week quarantine due to the rare human-to-human transmission capability of the suspected Andes virus strain.
The hantavirus has officially entered Israel. An Israeli went to Eastern Europe and thus begins the signs of an outbreak.
The official count is five deaths and over 159 people sick.
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| We are dealing with another potential pandemic. |
Health authorities across four continents Thursday were tracking down and monitoring passengers who disembarked a hantavirus-stricken cruise ship before its deadly outbreak was detected, and trying to trace others who may have come into contact with them since then.
In Argentina, a team of investigators has yet to leave for the southern town where they suspect the outbreak originated, officials from the country’s Health Ministry told The Associated Press on Thursday. The Argentine investigators suspect a Dutch couple may have contracted the virus while on a bird-watching trip before they boarded the cruise ship.
On April 24, nearly two weeks after the first passenger had died on board, more than two dozen people from at least 12 different countries left the ship without contact tracing, the ship’s operator and Dutch officials said Thursday.
Three passengers have died in the outbreak — a Dutch couple and a German national — and several others are sick. Symptoms usually show between one and eight weeks after exposure.
None of the remaining passengers or crew on the ship are currently symptomatic, the Netherlands-based Oceanwide Expeditions cruise ship company said Thursday.
The World Health Organization says the risk to the wider public is low. Hantavirus is usually spread by the inhalation of contaminated rodent droppings and isn’t easily transmitted between people.
“We believe this will be a limited outbreak if the public health measures are implemented and solidarity is shown across all countries,” said Dr. Abdirahman Mahamud, the WHO’s alert and response director on Thursday.
1st hantavirus case on board was confirmed May 2
Three people, including the ship’s doctor, were evacuated Wednesday while the ship was near the West African island country of Cape Verde and taken to specialized hospitals in Europe for treatment.
The body of the Dutch man who was the first to die on board on April 11 was taken off the ship on the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena on April 24, when his wife also disembarked. She then flew to South Africa a day later and died there.
The ship’s operator said Thursday that a total of 30 passengers — including the deceased Dutch man and his wife — left the vessel at St. Helena. The Dutch Foreign Ministry has put the figure at about 40. The company had not previously said publicly that dozens more people left the ship on April 24. The stop was the scheduled end of the cruise for some passengers.
It wasn’t until May 2 that health authorities first confirmed hantavirus in a ship passenger, the WHO says. That was in a British man evacuated from the ship to South Africa three days after the St. Helena stop. He was tested in South Africa and is in intensive care there.
Passengers who disembarked April 24 are being monitored
It emerged Wednesday that a man tested positive for hantavirus in Switzerland after he disembarked at St. Helena, though his precise movements in between aren’t clear.
On Thursday, Singaporean health authorities said they were monitoring two men who got off the ship at St. Helena, flew to South Africa and then home. The two men, who arrived in Singapore at different times, were being isolated and tested, officials said.
Authorities in St. Helena, the volcanic British territory in the South Atlantic where passengers disembarked, said they were monitoring a small number of people who were considered “higher risk contacts.” Those contacts were being told to isolate for 45 days, the St. Helena government said.
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| The most common rodents that carry the hantavirus. |
South Africa is tracing contacts from an April 25 flight
The Dutch health ministry said Thursday that a flight attendant on a plane briefly boarded by an infected cruise passenger in South Africa was showing symptoms of hantavirus and would be tested in an isolation ward at an Amsterdam hospital. The cruise passenger, the Dutch woman whose husband died on the ship, was too ill to take the international flight to Europe and was taken off the plane in Johannesburg, where she died.
If the Dutch flight attendant tests positive, she could be the first known person not on the MV Hondius to become infected in the outbreak.
Passengers from at least 12 countries got off the ship last month
Their nationalities spanned the globe. This map shows where the passengers are from, though it is unclear where they traveled after leaving the Hondius, and unclear if any of them are infected.
The vessel is now sailing to Spain’s Canary Islands, where it is expected to arrive Saturday or Sunday, with more than 140 passengers and crew members still on board.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Thursday that he had been in regular touch with the ship’s captain, and that morale improved once it began moving again.
Authorities in South Africa are also trying to trace contacts of any passengers who previously got off the ship. They have focused mainly on an April 25 flight from St. Helena to Johannesburg, the day after passengers disembarked there.
A French citizen with “benign symptoms” is in isolation and undergoing medical tests, after being identified as a contact case linked to the ship passenger who flew April 25 from St. Helena to Johannesburg and was confirmed to have hantavirus, the French Health Ministry said in a statement Thursday.
The Dutch woman from the cruise ship who later died in South Africa was on that St. Helena-Johannesburg flight, officials have said. It’s not known how many other cruise passengers were among the 88 people on it, but flights from St. Helena are rare. Flights to South Africa are normally once a week.
The body of the third fatality, a German woman, is also still on the ship after she died on May 2.
Unlike other hantaviruses, Andes virus may spread between people
Tests have confirmed that at least five people who were on the ship were infected with a hantavirus found in South America, called the Andes virus. The only hantavirus thought to spread human-to-human, it can cause a severe and often fatal lung disease called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome.
The ship departed from Argentina and investigations into the outbreak’s source are focusing there.
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| Mice are found in every continent except Antarctica. |
The Dutch couple who presented the first two cases had traveled through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay before boarding the ship, the WHO said. They visited sites where the species of rat known to carry Andes virus was present.
Argentina’s Health Ministry has zeroed in on the town of Ushuaia in their investigation, but they’ve yet to dispatch the team, according to a written statement given to AP. Scientists from the state-funded Malbrán Institute planned to travel to Ushuaia “in the coming days,” the statement said.
Once in Ushuaia, a 3.5-hour flight from Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, experts will analyze rodents at the trash heap there to see if they carry the Andes virus, officials said.
The WHO is working with health authorities in Argentina to understand the couple’s movements and has arranged to ship 2,500 diagnostic kits from Argentina to laboratories in five countries.
Argentina’s health ministry said there were 28 deaths from hantavirus last year, up from an average mortality rate of 15 in the five years before that. Nearly a third of cases last year were fatal, it said.
Clean your home.
Remove food, paper and moldy products.
Close holes. A hole no smaller than a diameter is a size perfect for mice.
Do not allow your pets mess with dead rodents.
if you see mice droppings or urine. Wear a mask and use gloves to clean the area.
If you support glue traps or box bait traps, use them. If you want humane ways, get peppermint spray that irritates their smell or sonic devices that disrupt mice hearing. Make sure you properly throw them away if you have rodent captures.
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