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A French woman infected in the deadly hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship is critically ill and being treated with an artificial lung, a doctor at the Paris hospital caring for the sickened passenger said Tuesday. The outbreak has now reached 11 total reported cases, 9 of which have been confirmed. Three people on the cruise died, including a Dutch couple that health officials believe were the first exposed to the virus while visiting South America. (Adamson and Bynum, 5/13)

The head of the World Health Organization has told countries to prepare for more hantavirus cases as authorities in Paris said a French woman who contracted the virus onboard the MV Hondius had the most severe form of the disease and had been put on a ventilator. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus thanked Spain for the “compassion and solidarity” it had shown by taking in the stricken cruise ship and urged authorities to follow the WHO’s advice and recommendations, which include a 42-day quarantine and constant monitoring of high-risk contacts. (Jones, 5/12)

The hantavirus outbreak on an expedition ship in the Atlantic Ocean that has killed three passengers is emerging as another test for an administration now led in part by officials who spent years criticizing pandemic-era public health messaging. Some top administration health figures, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and interim leader of the CDC Jay Bhattacharya, have argued that federal agencies overstated risks during covid and imposed overly broad preventive measures. (Sun, 5/12)

The Minnesota Department of Health is currently monitoring a resident who may have been exposed to hantavirus. The individual journeyed overseas and might have come into contact with someone who was on board the MV Hondius cruise ship, which traveled from Argentina to Europe. This cruise is linked to an outbreak of the rodent-borne Andes virus, a type of hantavirus that has infected passengers and resulted in three fatalities. (Zurek, 5/12)

Health officials are investigating a potential hantavirus case in Illinois, though the case is not linked to a recent outbreak of the illness on a cruise ship, the Illinois Department of Public Health announced Tuesday. (Schencker, 5/12)

Passengers from the Hondius cruise ship are being repatriated under a patchwork of measures that reflect uncertainty over how this strain of hantavirus spreads, complicating efforts to contain the deadly outbreak. Some passengers are being placed in biocontainment units, notably in France, for at least two weeks. Australia plans to quarantine passengers in a purpose-built facility outside Perth. But in the Netherlands, most are being asked to self-isolate for six weeks, with short outdoor walks permitted under masking and distancing rules. (Gale, 5/12)

As epidemiologists race to find more answers to the origin of the hantavirus outbreak on a cruise, they have ruled out some theories circulating online. Dr. Boris Pavlin, the team lead for field and humanitarian epidemiology at the World Health Organization, discussed the organization's current investigation into the outbreak with ABC News Sunday and stressed that while there are still unanswered questions, there are many clues that help to narrow down the origin. (Pereira, Rulli, Jovanovic and Castano, 5/12)

Scientists think the hantavirus, the deadly pathogen that has infected 11 passengers on a Dutch cruise ship, could be as old as humans. But much of their understanding of human cases comes from a handful of outbreaks within the past century. The first known outbreak came during the Korean War in the 1950s, when around 3,000 United Nations troops developed a mysterious illness that scientists would later recognize as hantavirus. (Bendix, 5/12)

Most hospitals are built with the expectation they will one day be full of people. This one was built with the expectation it would mostly be empty. This is the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, a high-tech facility designed to treat patients infected with highly lethal viruses or bacteria without transmitting them to hospital staff or the public. It got its first patient in six years on Monday, when a cruise passenger who tested positive for hantavirus arrived back in the U.S. (McKay, 5/12)

Eighteen Americans are now in quarantine in two federal centers after having returned home from the MV Hondius cruise ship. How long they’ll stay in quarantine or where isn’t clear yet. Now that the passengers have had time to rest up, U.S. health officials are interviewing them to get a better sense of how close the American passengers may have been to infected people — and whether they have the resources, such as separate rooms, to quarantine safely at home. (Edwards and Syal, 5/12)

Dr. Stephen Kornfeld was taking the trip of a lifetime aboard a cruise sailing across the Atlantic Ocean when he was called on to care for other passengers who fell ill. Now, he’s the only MV Hondius passenger in a biocontainment unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center after initially testing positive for Andes hantavirus. (Harvey, McPhillips and Tucker, 5/12)

In early 2020, Dr. Jerome Adams was about to face one of the toughest challenges in his career, as COVID-19 began spreading across the world during his tenure as surgeon general of the US. Six years later, as a different virus dominates the headlines, Adams and fellow medical experts are still determined to make an impact—but this time in a different way. (O'Connor, 5/12)