Italy tests two people for hantavirus amid quarantine measures

ROME — Italy is testing biological samples from two people for possible hantavirus infection, an Argentine tourist hospitalized with pneumonia and a man from Calabria in voluntary isolation, the Health Ministry said on Tuesday.

The Argentine tourist had left an endemic area back home on April 30 and traveled to Italy on a Buenos Aires-Rome flight before later going to Sicily, where she was hospitalized with pneumonia, the ministry said in a statement.

Local health authorities requested the test on Tuesday, and her sample was sent to the Spallanzani infectious diseases hospital in Rome, where it will be analyzed alongside a sample from the 25-year-old Calabrian man, who had briefly come into contact with a Dutch woman who later died from the virus.

British tourist in quarantine

In a separate development, a British tourist was located in Milan and placed in quarantine after British authorities warned he had been on the same flight as the Dutch woman, the Health Ministry said.

A companion traveling with him was also taken to hospital as a precaution.

Hantavirus is primarily spread by rodents but can be transmitted between people in rare cases, according to the World Health Organization. It usually begins with flu-like symptoms, such as fatigue and fever, one to eight weeks after exposure.

A cluster has been linked in recent days to the MV Hondius ship, which docked in Spain's Canary Islands following a polar expedition that departed from Argentina.

The WHO has increased its tally of confirmed cases in the outbreak to nine. It said further cases could materialize because of the long incubation period, but that this was not a pandemic, and nothing like COVID-19.

The British tourist had traveled on a St. Helena–Johannesburg flight on which Mirjam Schilperoord, the wife of the first victim, was also traveling.

Schilperoord transferred to a KLM flight bound for the Netherlands but the crew decided she was too sick to fly and removed her. She collapsed at the airport and died the next day.

The Calabrian man had also been on the KLM flight and even though any exposure to Schilperoord would have been brief, medical authorities are keeping passengers and crew in several countries under close observation. — Reuters