There are actually 11 confirmed hantavirus cases following an outbreak of the possibly fatal disease aboard the doomed MV Hondius.
One in all them, a French woman who had travelled on the ship, is now being treated with a man-made lung after she became critically ailing with the disease.
She has been admitted to the intensive care unit of Paris’ Bichat Hospital and is receiving treatment for what medical professionals have described as ‘essentially the most severe type of the cardiopulmonary presentation’.
French authorities are also reportedly scrambling to trace anyone who could have been exposed.
Xavier Lescure, an infectious disease specialist at Bichat Hospital, said: ‘The patient currently has essentially the most severe type of the cardiopulmonary presentation.
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‘She is on a man-made lung, a blood bypass, to permit, we hope, for her to get through this phase, while the lung attacked by the virus and the damage to the vascular wall can get better.’
The alternative lung has been described as being the ‘final stage of supportive care’.
Three people, including a Dutch couple, have died for the reason that ship’s first passenger began to present with symptoms on April 6.
The ship, which departed from Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1, docked in Saint Helena greater than three weeks later, where the body of the primary victim – who died on April 11 – was taken aboard and 30 more passengers disembarked.
The primary victim’s wife, Mirjam Schilperoord – who was one among them – then travelled by plane to Johannesburg, South Africa, where she died days later of the disease.
After the ship made its strategy to Tenerife, its remaining passengers were repatriated, including 20 British nationals and two UK residents who were subjected to a 72-hour mandatory quarantine at Arrowe Park Hospital in Merseyside – the identical facility that was used to isolate arrivals from Wuhan at first of the Covid pandemic.
The quarantine period has now ended, and a number of the passengers have been released but will proceed to isolate at home.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has repeatedly said the danger to the general public is low, insisting that the disease won’t cause one other pandemic just like the Covid-19 outbreak which shut down the world in 2020.
Nonetheless, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO, has warned there’ll likely be more cases of the disease.
‘After all, the situation could change,’ he told a press conference earlier this week.
‘And given the long incubation period of the virus, it’s possible we’d see more cases in the approaching weeks.’
Metro previously reported a British man in his 60s, who was meant to be isolating after he travelled on the identical plane as Schilperoord, was detained in a bar in Italy.
He and his travelling companion were apprehended in Milan and brought to Sacco Hospital, where they were told they would wish to stay until June 6.
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