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SUNDAY SCIENCE: HANTAVIRUS MISINFORMATION RUNS RAMPANT AS THE US IS
UNEQUIPPED TO RESPOND TO INFECTIOUS DISEASE HEALTH SCARE  
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Melody Schreiber
May 8, 2026
The Guardian
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_ The US’s withdrawal from the WHO – and cuts to the country’s
health system – stymie officials’ response -- What is hantavirus?
-- Where did the cruise ship hantavirus come from and what happens
next? _

Crew members wear hazmat suites on a boat heading towards the port
from the cruise ship MV Hondius off Cape Verde on Wednesday.,
AFP/Getty Images

 

The outbreak of hantavirus on the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius
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illuminates major gaps in the US public health system – a worrying
sign for stopping this outbreak quickly and preparing for a potential
pandemic of a more widespread pathogen in coming years, experts say.

Passengers and their close contacts are at risk of hantavirus
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and need to follow public health guidance, but the danger for most
people is near zero, officials and scientists say. Experts expect more
cases in this outbreak to be identified, but they are emphatic that a
hantavirus pandemic is highly unlikely.

“This is not Covid
[[link removed]], this is not
influenza. It spreads very, very differently,” Maria Van Kerkhove,
director of epidemic and pandemic management at the World Health
Organization (WHO), said at a briefing on Thursday. “This is not the
same situation we were in six years ago … It’s very different.”

The WHO [[link removed]]
has been coordinating a response with several countries. But Trump
pulled out of the organization
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soon after taking office, and US leadership has been conspicuously
absent in the global hantavirus response, experts say.

While not a virus with pandemic potential, hantavirus is a warning
sign that reveals how cuts to US capacity have severely limited the
ability of officials and scientists to track and understand pathogens
like these, with troubling implications for rare outbreaks and for
pandemic preparedness writ large.

There are now three suspected and five confirmed cases of Andes virus,
a type of hantavirus that can sometimes spread with close, intimate
contact but is typically spread by rodents. Three people have died,
and three have been hospitalized, including in intensive care –
though those patients are showing signs of improving, officials said
on Thursday. One of the patients, a Dutch flight attendant, has tested
negative for Andes virus, according
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to Inside Medicine.

The risk to global health

“My personal worry is essentially zero,” said Bill Hanage,
professor of epidemiology at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public
Health [[link removed]]. “The vast
majority of the world has absolutely no worry at all … What they
should be doing is paying attention to public health officials and
acting appropriately if they are told their risk happens to be
higher.”

Hanage is concerned that health leadership cuts, growing
misinformation, and distrust of public health measures could
complicate that process and contribute to some onward transmission.

In the absence of trusted information, misinformation about the
outbreak is swirling – including fears of another pandemic. The
“radio silence” from officials is one of the most concerning parts
of the outbreak for Boghuma Titanji, an infectious disease physician
and assistant professor at the Emory School of Medicine, because “it
just fuels the public anxiety”, she said. “People are still
reeling from the trauma that was Covid-19, and a lot of people who
experienced that still have a degree of PTSD. So it’s very hard to
not spiral.”

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not held a
briefing or created a resource page for the public concerning the
hantavirus; top officials haven’t gone on TV shows and held
interviews about the risk to the American public. That is a
significant departure from how the US typically communicates about an
outbreak like this, Titanji said. Two Dutch physicians and an
infectious disease expert were deployed by the European Centre for
Disease Prevention and Control to provide medical and psychosocial
support on the cruise ship.

“A [US] CDC crew would have been with them, or at least been
offered. Now they’re nowhere to be found,” Titanji said.

On Friday afternoon, CNN
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reported that the CDC was dispatching staffers to meet the ship in the
Canary Islands and had made “plans to escort its American passengers
back to the US aboard a charter flight”. The network also reported
that a separate CDC team was sent to Nebraska, where passengers are
expected to be placed into quarantine to ensure that the virus
doesn’t spread.

The US Department of State is now leading the US response, according
to the first and only CDC press release
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on the issue, sent on Wednesday evening after days of no guidance.
State officials are engaged in “direct contact” with passengers,
diplomacy, and coordination with domestic and global health officials,
the short announcement said. That move is highly unusual, Titanji
said. Typically the CDC, with decades of experience responding to
Andes virus outbreaks, would take the lead on health coordination.

“CDC is aware of the reports of hantavirus on a cruise ship and is
providing technical input and guidance as requested,” a CDC official
said. The CDC did not grant the Guardian’s request to speak with an
agency hantavirus expert and did not respond to questions about
whether the agency has testing and laboratory capacity for hantavirus,
what precautions passengers have been advised to take upon their
return, and how the agency plans to support local health providers and
officials if they encounter hantavirus patients.

When it comes to rare diseases that a physician might only encounter
once or twice in their career, the first step is usually to call the
CDC for advice on how to test and diagnose and how to contain further
transmission, Titanji said. “We’re losing that type of support.”

Public health in the US under Trump

US health agencies have suffered body blows under Trump. Agencies are
hollowed out after staff were laid off and fired, with some driven to
quit; key posts are left vacant. All of the full-time cruise ship
inspectors with the CDC were unexpectedly laid off
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last year while the teams were actively investigating two outbreaks.
Research, especially the kind of virological work that might
illuminate hantavirus transmission, has been heavily politicized and
slashed. Funding for the rapid development of new vaccines has been
halted while misinformation about vaccines flourishes.

Laboratory staff have been gutted, and it’s not clear if the US has
tests and laboratory capacity for hantaviruses. States cannot send
samples to the CDC for orthopoxvirus testing – like mpox – because
that division has been temporarily paused, and labs can no longer test
to see which parasite is causing leishmaniasis, Titanji said. In
April, rabies testing at the CDC was also temporarily halted.

Research on virology itself has come under intensely politicized
scrutiny and limitations. The White House issued an executive order
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to curb research on viruses in May, and the National Institutes of
Health made sweeping cuts
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to this work. Lawmakers have also introduced bills to cut what they
have loosely termed “gain of function” research. The scientific
consensus on the origins of Sars-CoV-2 points strongly to a spillover
from animals into people, yet officials continue investigating a lab
leak scenario, which means scientists are facing subpoenas, arrests
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and prosecution.

“We should be investing in doing more to understand how these
spillover events take place – and that’s actually the very
opposite of what’s going on at the moment,” Hanage said.

The damage isn’t only at the federal level. More than half of US
states passed laws to restrict health officials’ ability to require
quarantine and isolation or recommend masks; some schools are being
prevented from requiring some vaccines for attendance and are
forbidden from shutting down during another health crisis.

Seeing the response to an outbreak of hantavirus, which is not
considered a high-consequence virus, is disconcerting, Titanji said.
“If we had a significant outbreak of a high-consequence pathogen, it
would be very, very concerning to see what the response and the
leadership of that response would be.”

The WHO is narrowing in on human-to-human transmission in this
outbreak, but the spread is still very limited to those who had very
close contact with patients. In late 2018 and early 2019, there was a
similar outbreak [[link removed]]
in Argentina, when 34 people ultimately tested positive and 11 died.
“We believe that’s happening” in this case as well, with
transmission from the first two patients to close contacts, including
the doctor who treated them on the cruise ship, Van Kerkhove said.

“If we follow public health measures and the lesson we learned from
Argentina now is shared across all countries – what needs to happen
in contact tracing, isolation – we can break this chain of
transmission,” said Abdirahman Mahamud, infection prevention control
specialist at WHO.

That kind of outbreak investigation is how the patient in Switzerland
was identified, Van Kerkhove said, adding that this was actually
public health action at work

Passengers from 12 countries, including the US, disembarked from the
ship before the outbreak was discovered and have now returned home.
Following up with these individuals – and, if they were ill while
they traveled, others they may have encountered – is critical work,
Hanage said. “It’s very important to be doing some extremely
aggressive contact tracing of everybody who left the boat, and they
should be quarantined,” he said. It may be more complicated than the
measures that worked in Argentina, he said, because “we have
multiple authorities and multiple jurisdictions, which means that it
may take more time to coordinate an adequate response”.

Given misinformation and mistrust in officials in the US, “it
remains to be seen” how closely people will follow health guidance
– and how willing authorities will be to implement it following the
Covid backlash, Hanage said. “Everything that we know about both
this outbreak and previous ones indicates that this is controllable,
and I expect that it will be controlled. How long it will take to be
controlled is another question. The appetite for that control will be
a major part in deciding how easily it’s done and how long it
ultimately takes.”

While the US is withdrawn from the WHO, it has not yet withdrawn from
the International Health Regulations (IHR), which means officials are
still receiving all the latest technical information. “In terms of
collaboration with US and US institutions, it has been going very
well,” Mahamud said. “The information flow is there, transparent
and frank.” But, he added, “this outbreak has seen why the world
needs a global entity that coordinates” the response.

“This is what makes a platform like WHO very, very important,”
said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, who
expressed hope that the US and Argentina would “reconsider”
decisions to leave the organization. “Any vacuum, any space which is
not covered, actually gives advantage to the virus. And the best
immunity we have is solidarity.”

_MELODY SCHREIBER is a journalist focused on health, science, and the
Arctic. She has chronicled the effects of climate change on mental
health in the Arctic and the changing tides of livelihoods in the
Chesapeake Bay, and she has covered infectious disease outbreaks from
their earliest days—including Covid-19, mpox, and bird flu._

_GUARDIAN (US) Covers American and international news for an online,
global audience._

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