Hantavirus timeline: how a little-known virus became a global outbreak

Fonte: New York Post

The hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship has thrown a previously little-known virus into international headlines and mobilized health authorities from all corners of the globe, with the head of the World Health Organization arriving in Spain Sunday ahead of the ship’s arrival near the Canary Islands. The outbreak was caused by same rare virus that killed Gene Hackman’s wife Betsy Arakawa in New Mexico last year, but the strain aboard the ship – the Andes virus – is uniquely able to transmit from human to human. On May 6, epidemiologists boarded the boat in Cape Verde, before it set sail for the Canary Islands.