When South African infectious disease specialist Lucille Blumberg checked her email on the morning of May 1, while the country was celebrating the Labor Day holiday, an urgent message caught her attention.
A U.K.-based colleague had written about a passenger from a cruise ship sailing thousands of miles away in the Atlantic Ocean who had been evacuated and admitted to a Johannesburg hospital with suspected pneumonia. Others aboard the vessel were also sick.
The colleague, who monitors diseases in remote British overseas territories in the South Atlantic Ocean, asked Blumberg to follow up on the passenger, who had been evacuated from the ship in one of the territories, Ascension Island.
Blumberg and other experts at South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases were suddenly thrown into the race to identify the cause of an outbreak aboard the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius.
“Even though it was a public holiday, we moved, we moved really fast,” Blumberg told The Associated Press. “It was busy. There were many conversations. There were online discussions, and there was laboratory testing happening at the time.”
Within 24 hours, they had determined that the man’s illness was caused by hantavirus, a rare rodent-borne virus.
The elderly British man had arrived at a private hospital in Johannesburg days earlier and was seriously ill, but health workers weren’t sure of the underlying cause.
By the time he was evacuated from the ship, two elderly Dutch passengers who had been on board the MV Hondius cruise liner had already died, but there had been little alarm. Ascension Island health authorities had reported a cluster of illnesses on the ship that appeared to be pneumonia to the World Health Organisation.
At first, Blumberg and her colleagues thought it might be Legionella, a bacterium that causes a serious form of pneumonia, Legionnaires’ disease. Or maybe bird flu.
“I called my infectious disease colleagues, and we had a caucus, and we discussed the usual ones,” Blumberg said. “Legionella is well described in outbreaks in hotels and on cruise ships, and influenza certainly is. These people had visited islands where avian influenza is well documented.”
Tests on all those were negative. The experts also ran an extensive panel of tests for other respiratory diseases. Also, all negative.
The team then began looking more closely at where the ship came from — Argentina — and the fact that passengers on board were avid bird watchers and had reportedly been to parts of South America where there were birds, but also rodents.
