I am about at the end of my rope with this already.
It has me wondering if the dark powers that be are really so worried about Trump getting everything turned around in time for the midterms or what, that they've suddenly and ghoulishly latched onto Plague Ship, Part Deux.
Now, they are trying to approach the subject with a certain amount of coy dissembling.
NOW, WE KNOW THERE'S NORMALLY NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT BECAUSE THIS IS SO RARE BUT...
Yeah, it's rare. The only time I have ever heard of any hanta virus cases were stoners sitting in a hot, dusty, enclosed Navajo hogan smoking psychedlic shrooms and performing weird sexual rituals some doper guru from Encino had cooked up so they could reach their inner Nirvana.
Or the once-in-a-while tragic case, like Gene Hackman's wife.
It's definitely a risk and always has been with the wee little rodents who poop their way in and out of desert Southwest dwellings.
Not so much in other places the rest of us go, which, I am pretty sure, does not include a rat-infested dump in the Andes or remote villages in Northern Patagonia.
This, however, is a cautionary tale if one so inclined, as our Southwest Hanta strain does not transit human to human, where the Andes strain does.
Poor Patient Zero from Plague Ship One (aka MV Hondius), a Dutch ornithologist, had been on an extended birdwatching trip through the Andes with his wife.
Patient zero in the deadly hantavirus outbreak has been identified as ornithologist Leo Schilperoord, who was on a five-month trip to South America with his wife when they boarded the MV Hondius.
— AF Post (@AFpost) May 9, 2026
Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/xGpWbVUbwH
The four-month road trip through Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina took them through territory inhabited by the carrier of this particular strain of the Hanta virus, the long-tailed Colilargo rat. It's the only rodent in the world that carries this strain of Hanta virus.
So when Mr Schilperoord became ill on the vessel and was diagnosed, along with his wife, who also became ill, they looked back at his route and initially settled on a garbage dump infested with rats that the two had spent time at.
Tragically, they both died from contracting the virus.
But medical detective work is always so fascinating, and it turns out that the answer was too easy. The rats there are not the correct rats for this virus, so where had they contracted the disease?
Much earlier in their trip they had been in Northern Patagonia, an area filled with the Colilargo rats which was having a smallish Hanta virus outbreak of its own at the time.
Voila. At least one answer.
Patient Zero in the MV Hondius hantavirus outbreak has been identified.
— TWT UNLEASHED (@TWT_UNLEASHED) May 13, 2026
But investigators now believe he caught the virus in a completely different location than originally reported.
Watch now.#hantavirus #worldnews #health #news #fyp pic.twitter.com/u6KZE3iM9E
Meanwhile, onboard the ship, there was only one doctor, who soon became ill himself, and one of the passengers, a doctor, stepped forward to take care of the other passengers
Obviously, as none had any idea what the circumstances were or how contagious the virus was, the ship was unwelcome at any ports they'd tried to pull into.
One of the passengers who was ill was British and had gotten off on the remote island of Tristan da Cunha, which is part of the Ascension and St Helena chain.
The British sent paratroopers in with supplies and doctors.
A daredevil delivery of hantavirus supplies! A British paratrooper shared a first-person perspective of a vital medical mission to a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean. A total of six paratroopers and two military doctors parachuted onto the island of Tristan da Cunha to support… pic.twitter.com/nVg1HjK6zG
— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) May 13, 2026
I read that forty or so people had disembarked at St Helena before the virus was identified, and went on to Johannesburg by air. The end of their segment of the cruise, probably. They are tracing tickets and flights to find them.
A couple of those were jet-setting Americans, and they've found two of them.
One was in the Pitcairns. She'll be staying for a while after traveling without alerting authorities she had been on the MV Hondius.
Radio New Zealand reports an American citizen who is a “hantavirus contact case” flew from San Francisco to Tahiti to remote Pitcairn Island on Thursday without telling anyone and has now been quarantined there after authorities became aware she arrived. pic.twitter.com/FisMxCO95m
— Jacqueline Sweet (@JSweetLI) May 12, 2026
The other is a woman from New York.
NEW: I discovered that a second American woman jet-setted around the globe after leaving the MV Hondius in late April, traveling through at least four countries before attending an international conference in Vietnam.
— Jacqueline Sweet (@JSweetLI) May 13, 2026
It's unclear if health authorities in the US are aware of…
...It's unclear if health authorities in the US are aware of the NYC resident's time on the ship or travels.
Many of the American passengers who disembarked at St Helena have either contacted their local health departments or those departments are actively looking for them.
More than two dozen passengers potentially exposed to hantavirus aboard a cruise ship disembarked almost 2 weeks ago, several sources confirmed to MedPage Today, and Americans who were among them are now back on U.S. soil.
A total of 30 passengers disembarked the MV Hondius at St. Helena on April 24, several sources confirmed to MedPage Today.
There are about seven Americans who disembarked at that time and have since returned to the U.S., and states have been working to track them down for testing and monitoring, according to sources with close knowledge of the situation.
They say the passengers live in several states, including Arizona, California, Georgia, Texas, and Virginia.
A spokesperson for the California Department of Public Health told MedPage Today that it was "notified by the CDC of California residents that were onboard the cruise ship that had passengers infected with hantavirus."
The other passengers stranded on board were ferried off in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, and airlifted back to their home nations. The MV Hondius, with thirty crew members and the body of one passenger still onboard, will be headed to the Netherlands for decontamination when they finally dock.
All the Americans are at a CDC facility on an Air Force base in Nebraska, and so far, are doing well. I think there's been one positive test. The problem with this virus is that it takes up to 42 days to develop, so it could be a long stretch sitting in the cornfields. But they're in good hands.
And, yeah, that sucks. But as even the WHO's creepy Dr. Tedros says, being quarantined on the ship would have been unimaginably cruel.
There's also been some really good news about the sequencing of the virus's DNA, as cases started to blossom between folks who weren't intimately connected, but were trapped on a cruise ship or in a airplane together - close enough quarters with tighter shared spaces than, say, passing in a grocery store or on the sidewalk.
The DNA hasn't mutated a lick. It's the same strain - no weird virus voodoo going on.
Some sort of good news.
— CultureCrone (@CultureCrone) May 13, 2026
“All sequences obtained to date are virtually identical, which means that there is likely only a single transmission event from an infected animal to a human" https://t.co/ShYySxgrZ2 @EUCouncil @Number10cat
One poop, one human, and it was off to the races, but, thankfully, that's it.
The European Union’s health agency ECDC said Wednesday there was nothing to suggest that the Andes strain of hantavirus had mutated following a deadly outbreak of the illness on a cruise ship.
The deaths of three passengers from a rare hantavirus outbreak on a cruise from Argentina to Cape Verde has sparked international alarm.
Seven other passengers are confirmed to have the virus, including a French woman in a critical condition, while an eighth case is considered “probable,” according to an AFP tally.
All of the passengers have been evacuated and are now in quarantine.
“Preliminary investigations based on the whole genome sequencing that is available to us suggest that there are no indications that this virus is acting any differently from the known virus circulating in some regions of the world,” Andreas Hoefer, of the Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, told journalists.
“All sequences obtained to date are virtually identical, which means that there is likely only a single transmission event from an infected animal to a human,” added Hoefer, a microbiologist and molecular epidemiologist.
But the COVID ghouls are smacking their lips, feeding the fear frenzy.
Narrative: '6 feet' mentioned again and it's more infectious than you think... Just passing someone and saying hello can lead to the spread of Hantavirus! 😂
— Andrew Bridgen (@ABridgen) May 13, 2026
Legacy media pushing the Hantavirus narrative ! pic.twitter.com/tp5z4TjXxm
And 'getting ready' - just in case.
Here we go again, just in time for the midterms! pic.twitter.com/CFhb05tLqr
— Vince Langman (@LangmanVince) May 12, 2026
The open-air contagion ballet repeats itself anew.
Logic check.
— Ian Copeland, PhD (@IanCopeland5) May 13, 2026
If non fire fighters walk past a fire in jeans, where actual fire fighters are wearing fire fighting equipment, is the fire "fake"?
Exactly...
IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE TO HAVE A FIVE-ALARM FIRE BELL
So many people will be disappointed to hear that.
Infectious disease expert Dr. Michael Osterholm on the transmission and treatment for hantavirus: “Right now you can manage the individuals who have been exposed very simply.” https://t.co/XC5jpXQYzo pic.twitter.com/DEI0k2GchX
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) May 10, 2026
So disappointed.
But I do like that they're not out with flames on their heads and are upfront about what this is.
Besides...
Moment influencer strokes rodent in hantavirus ‘ground zero’ pic.twitter.com/1DAjyoQalp
— The Sun (@TheSun) May 13, 2026
...there's only so much anyone can do to help people keep themselves safe, if you get my drift.
Beege ADDS: Lest anyone else accuse me of 'flippancy' when it comes to our own homegrown Hanta virus risks, I did say it was rare, as it is. But that doesn't mean it doesn't kill you, as I noted in the Hackman case. The flippancy is directed at the COVID-erz reaction in quarters based on a known virus.
Also, most everyone should know - and now they do if they didn't - not to go into rodent-infested attics and crawl spaces without breathing and adequate skin safety protection, because it can be in mice or rat urine and feces anywhere from Florida to Washington State and in between.
And thanks to someone in the comments, apparently very familiar with it, we have some more facts:
Anyone who has the misfortune of stirring up fresh urine and droppings can contract it.... It has a 40% mortality and doesn’t seem to care if you are young. The only treatment is life support. BTW; it apparently got here decades ago from southeast Asia, where it’s a renal disease. It mutated into the pulmonary disease we have.
And there are two forms - Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) with a 38% fatality rate and Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) with a 5-15% fatality rate.
As Jeff also noted in the comments, there have been 890 cases since 1993 when they started keeping track. If one assumes a base fatality rate of 35%, again, that is a minuscule number - 100 or so deaths every decade. Rare, as I said, which is why many people have never heard of it, and also the circumstances in which I had it.
I would wager that it remains rare thanks to the sanitation standards in the US and the emphasis on rodent control and personal protective gear when dealing with rodent infestations here.
Things could shift drastically as our cities deteriorate, as these recent plague and typhus outbreaks are precursors of system safeguards out of balance.
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