Venezuela officials confirmed last week that three people had died of hantavirus infections, but stressed there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission in the South American country, which has rarely reported cases of the rodent-borne disease in humans, reports The Associated Press.
The Health Ministry said hantavirus was also suspected in the deaths of two health workers in the southwestern state of Barinas, but that those cases remain under investigation and were not linked to the three fatalities in the eastern state of Anzoátegui, about 655km away.
The deaths in both regions were described as isolated incidents that “do not represent a risk to the general community”, but the ministry added that health workers would be sent to the affected states to “guarantee the health security of all Venezuelans”, without elaborating.
As a recent deadly outbreak aboard a cruise ship in the Atlantic showed, some hantaviruses can spread between people in rare cases. The little-studied Andes hantavirus, detected in the outbreak that killed three passengers and infected several others on the MV Hondius in May, raised concerns worldwide due to its mortality rate, as high as 30%, and the current lack of treatment and vaccines.
Weeks later in Argentina, from where the hantavirus-stricken cruise set sail, authorities are still trying to figure out the origin of the outbreak.
An early hypothesis suggested that patient zero, a Dutch ornithologist, may have become infected in the southernmost city of Ushuaia, famed for its location “at the end of the world”. But Argentine scientists who tested rats for the Andes hantavirus in the area recently ruled out Ushuaia as the source of the outbreak.
Argentina also concluded the wine-producing province of Mendoza was not the source of contagion earlier this month, after local investigators and biologists from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention found no trace of hantavirus in rodents collected from areas visited by the Dutch man and his wife.
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Deadly hantavirus outbreak over, WHO announces
How SA team homed in on hantavirus