Researchers search for the Andes hantavirus at the Malbrán Institute, in Argentina, on May 6, 2026. AFP PHOTO / ARGENTINA'S HEALTH MINISTRY
The discovery of a cluster of hantavirus infections aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius on Sunday, May 3, has brought attention to this family of viruses, which is present worldwide but little known to the general public. More specifically, the Andes strain of hantavirus, the only strain capable of human-to-human transmission and not just rodent-to-human, was identified in at least three sick individuals. The Andes virus has only very rarely been studied, as it has led to just two significant outbreaks in Argentina, in 1996 and 2018, with a total of 51 cases between them.
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Gustavo Palacios is one of the authors who co-signed the main study on the second Andes virus outbreak, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2020. Together with his colleagues, he described the outbreak that occurred in the small town of Epuyén, in southern Argentina, from November 2018 to February 2019, in which 34 people fell ill and 11 died. He studied the cases of "superspreader" patients who were responsible for four waves of infection. The first patient, who had a fever, infected five guests at a birthday party. One of them then infected six more people due to his active social life, and then ten others became ill after his funeral and wake, and so on.
