A Dutch flight attendant is being tested for the hantavirus at a hospital in the Netherlands after she came into contact with someone infected with the virus, the Dutch health ministry said on Thursday, as global health officials scrambled to track people connected to a deadly outbreak of the virus on a cruise ship.
Health authorities have sought to alleviate concern about the spread of the pathogen among the general public, noting that human-to-human transmission of the hantavirus, a rare family of viruses carried by rodents, is very rare.
The Dutch health ministry did not provide more details about the case. It was not immediately clear if the flight attendant was showing symptoms or whether she had worked on a flight that one of the victims of the cruise ship outbreak, a 69-year-old Dutch woman, had briefly boarded the day before dying.
Dutch media outlets reported that the flight attendant worked for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, the airline that the woman had been scheduled to travel on. The company declined to comment, citing privacy considerations for its employees.
Since April 11, three passengers who were aboard the MV Hondius, a Dutch-flagged cruise ship, have died and at least five other people have been sickened after showing symptoms of the hantavirus, according to the World Health Organization.
The first fatality was a 69-year-old Dutch man who died on board the ship on April 11. His 69-year-old wife became ill and died on April 26 in Johannesburg, South Africa, while attempting to fly home to the Netherlands.
On April 25, the day before she died, she spent more than an hour boarding KLM Flight 592 from Johannesburg to Amsterdam and sitting on the plane, according to the airline. Barbara de Beukelaar, a passenger on that flight, said in a phone interview that the woman had been helped onto the plane in a wheelchair.
The woman was tended to by airline staff members who decided not to take her on the nearly 12-hour flight because of her health, according to KLM. After she was taken off the plane and handed over to the airport’s ground staff, the flight took off for Amsterdam.
“Nobody on board thought that they were dealing with a contagious virus,” Ms. de Beukelaar said.
KLM said that it had handed over the flight’s passenger list to Dutch health authorities for contact tracing.
The Hondius — carrying almost 150 passengers and crew from almost two dozen countries — was on its way Thursday to the Canary Islands after three people who may have been infected with the virus were evacuated to the Netherlands.
“All three individuals, two symptomatic and one asymptomatic, are now in the care of medical professionals,” Oceanwide Expeditions, the Dutch company operating the cruise, said in a statement on Thursday.
Health officials have confirmed three cases of the hantavirus so far, all of them involving the Andes strain of the virus, which is primarily found in South America. The Andes strain is the only type known to spread from human to human, which requires close, sustained contact.
Tracing everyone who may have come in contact with the virus could prove challenging.
On April 24, 30 people from at least 12 different countries disembarked from the ship in St. Helena, an island in the South Atlantic. That was more than a week before the first confirmed case of the virus was reported, according to Oceanwide.
The company said it had contacted the people who disembarked in St. Helena. At least one of them, a man in Switzerland, was receiving care in a hospital in Zurich and had tested positive for the virus, according to the W.H.O.
“We are working to establish details of all passengers and crew who embarked and disembarked” the ship since March 20, Oceanwide said.
South Africa’s health minister, Aaron Motsoaledi, said on Wednesday that the authorities in his country had identified 62 people — including medical and airport workers — who had been in contact with sick passengers from the ship.
Britain’s Health Security Agency said in a statement on Wednesday that two people who were on board the ship and had returned to Britain were self-isolating. Neither person was reporting symptoms, the agency said.
In the United States, residents in three states were being monitored for potential hantavirus infections after being on the ship, according to officials. None of them had symptoms, the officials said.