A French woman who tested positive for hantavirus after disembarking from the virus-stricken cruise ship is now in a critical condition after doctors initially dismissed her symptoms as anxiety.
The passenger’s condition started to deteriorate rapidly after she was finally able to leave the ill-fated MV Hondius vessel when it docked in Spain’s Canary Islands on Sunday, The Guardian reported.
The woman had initially developed flu-like symptoms on the luxury liner but appeared to be recovering — prompting doctors to speculate she was likely anxious or stressed amid the deadly outbreak.
“They were not thinking that these symptoms were compatible with hantavirus. Why? Because what she was telling [them] was [that she had] an episode of coughing some days ago that had disappeared, and what she was having at that moment was kind of like stress or anxiety or nervousness. So it was not catalogued [as hantavirus],” Spanish health minister Javier Padilla Bernáldez.
The woman, who was one of five French passengers who left the ship on Sunday, was flown to a hospital in Paris where her condition worsened overnight.
She remains in a critical condition and is being treated by a specialized infectious disease unit, French health officials said.
Meanwhile, as the outbreak continues to unfold, a dozen hospital workers in the Netherlands were thrown into quarantine after they handled blood and urine from a hantavirus patient without strict PPE protocols.
The staffers at the Radboudumc hospital in the city of Nijmegen will be quarantined for six weeks as a preventative measures, officials said.
It comes as health officials in various countries continued to monitor the ordeal after the rare Andes strain of hantavirus, is communicable between people, ran rampant on the ship — killing three passengers and putting dozens of others at risk for infection.
Eighteen Americans were flown back to the US and quarantined on Monday, with the one passenger who tested weakly positive now in a Nebraska biocontainment unit.
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