Passengers start disembarking from hantavirus-hit cruise ship

AP

Tenerife

The first plane carrying passengers from the hantavirus-hit cruise ship left Spain's Canary Islands on Sunday for Madrid, where they will be taken to a military hospital.

Spanish nationals were the first to leave the MV Hondius, which remains anchored off Tenerife, the largest island in the Spanish archipelago off West Africa's coast. The ship arrived hours earlier.

None of the more than 140 people on the Hondius has shown symptoms of the virus, Spain's health ministry, the World Health Organization and cruise company Oceanwide Expeditions said.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus sought to reassure the public, repeating on Sunday that the risk for the general public from the outbreak remained low.

All aboard ‘high-risk’ contacts: WHO 

Geneva: The World Health Organization (WHO) said that all people aboard a cruise ship affected by a hantavirus outbreak should be considered "high-risk" contacts and actively monitored for 42 days. "We classify everybody on board as what we call a high-risk contact," Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, told a media briefing.

She noted that currently "nobody on board has any symptoms," but recommended "active monitoring and follow-up of all the passengers and crew who disembark for a 42-day period." However, she stressed that the risk to the public and people in the Canary Islands, remains "low."