Hantavirus on Cruise Ship: Canadians in Isolation as Outbreak Spreads | Your Morning

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Foreign Affairs Minister, Anita Anand, says consular officials will be in the Canary Islands this weekend assisting four Canadian passengers who are on board the cruise ship that is dealing with a hantavirus outbreak.

[00:00:12]We have contacted the Canadians by email after obtaining the manifest of the ship and uh again offering all support to those Canadians should they wish to have it.

[00:00:30]So, that is what is to come. We are also learning that passengers who traveled back to Canada from that cruise are now self-isolating. This is a similar story playing out in multiple countries around the world as contact tracers are racing to identify where this virus could go next. For more on where the outbreak stands this morning, we're joined by Ray Wat Dienandan. He's the epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa. Good to have you with us on a Friday. Welcome.

[00:00:54]Thank you. Good morning. So, we know from the federal government that three Canadians right now are self-isolating.

[00:01:00]We've got two passengers who left the ship last month. They're isolating in Ontario. The third Canadian who came into contact with a symptomatic individual on a flight, they are isolating in Quebec. Ottawa says all three are asymptomatic and that they are being monitored. I guess at the end of this week, you know, set this up for us. What is the risk to the Canadian public because we're also awaiting four other passengers to come home and we don't know what province they're in yet.

[00:01:25]Yeah, the risk is extraordinarily low.

[00:01:27]As we've heard, this is not COVID, it's not measles, it's not a flu, it's not a highly spreadable disease. It's actually quite difficult to get it from somebody else. Hantavirus has many versions. This particular version is the only one that goes person to person and even so, you need intimate contact like sleeping in the same bed, sharing bodily fluids and so on to acquire it as the best we know.

[00:01:48]So, the risk is is low. The the tricky part is that the incubation period can be quite long, as long as eight weeks.

[00:01:56]Some of these people have to isolate for a long time and wait to see if symptoms arise. The scary part of course is that there's no treatment and the risk of death is quite high if you acquire it.

[00:02:07]You know doctor, throughout the week people have been listening to press conferences and I've heard this from numerous people that the language that they hear coming from the press conference is a real throwback to COVID and if you were around for it SARS where there was a lot of talk of stay calm, don't panic and then you know everybody was in isolation months later.

[00:02:24]So what can you say to people? What can you reassure people right now that this is actually different cuz the language it sounds the same. Yeah.

[00:02:31]So this is not new. We've had hantavirus with us for many many decades. Canada has like a hundred indigenous cases. By indigenous I mean domestically grown cases over the past 30 years or so. So it's not a new thing for us either. Most of our cases are in Western Canada.

[00:02:46]They're not the Andes strain which is a person-to-person transmission, but it's not something that we're unaware of and unfamiliar with. The USA has had like a thousand cases in the last 30 years. We have 200,000 cases globally every year.

[00:03:00]It's just that now we have some newsworthy cases of the particular Andes strain which has limited person-to-person transmission. So again, this is not new. It's known. The the scientifically interesting part of this is that it occurred in a cruise ship so we can observe this maybe enhanced person-to-person transmission and we have this unprecedented global coordination of contact tracing. That's really the only new part of this.

[00:03:24]Well, new but then you know people heard that before and it was related back to the pandemic. So you know you know where the fear is coming from. I want to ask you about planes so outside of the the cruise ship. We learned that the KLM flight attendant who was hospitalized after being in contact with a cruise ship passenger who died of hantavirus has tested negative. There's also contact tracing for 30 passengers who got off the cruise at some point for the tours. Um but there's all those people who were on board those flights who aren't isolating who may have used their washroom, for example, on the on the flight that there were people who may or may not have had the virus. So, when you're talking about contact tracing, what do we need to be worried about, what don't we need to be worried about?

[00:04:05]For this particular disease, I suspect that they're focusing on contact tracing for intimate contacts, people with extraordinarily close contact with these individuals, not people you pass in a bathroom or spend some time with on a bus or places like that. To the best of our knowledge, again, it's quite difficult to acquire this disease um from from casual contact.

[00:04:27]I mean, that might change. Science is pretty flexible these days, but again, we've been looking at this disease for many decades, and it is unusual to acquire it in a casual way. So, that's why the level of risk is quite low.

[00:04:40]We've never seen any sort of sustained global transmission of this disease. It would have to acquire a significant mutation to have that capacity, and we're not seeing that.

[00:04:49]Uh you know, we're watching this cruise ship, which is going to be coming in on the weekend. Of course, there's those four Canadians who are on board. Uh the ship has said everybody's asymptomatic.

[00:04:57]So, what precautions need to be in place once that ship arrives in the Canary Islands, and passengers start to return to their home countries?

[00:05:05]I think passengers should keep to themselves. I think they should self-isolate for an extended period of time. Not like, you know, shut her off through win- through windows and have all their food uh delivered or things like that, but avoid human contact and really monitor closely for symptoms. Public health should be thoroughly on top of this. For the public, I think the In a scale of zero to 10, I think the public should be like 0.5 concerned. And by that, I mean be aware of the disease, educate yourself, but let public health do its job, because they are doing their job on this front.

[00:05:37]All right.

[00:05:39]epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa, a good sort of calming voice at the end of the week. Thanks so much for being with us. My pleasure.

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