Andes | Pakistan

The European Union’s health agency (ECDC) said on Wednesday there was nothing to suggest that the Andes strain of hantavirus had mutated following a deadly outbreak of the illness on a cruise ship. The deaths of three passengers from a rare hantavirus outbreak on a cruise from Argentina to Cape Verde sparked international alarm. Seven other passengers are confirmed to have the virus, including a French woman in a critical condition, while an eighth case is considered “probable”, according to an AFP tally. All of the passengers have been evacuated and are now in quarantine. “Preliminary investigations based on the whole genome sequencing that is available to us suggest that there are no indications that this virus is acting any differently from the known virus circulating in some regions of the world,” Andreas Hoefer, of the Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, told journalists. “All sequences obtained to date are virtually identical, which means that there is likely only a singl...