Hantavirus outbreak renews painful memories for Patagonian village

With the recent hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship, hard memories have resurfaced for the 33-year-old.

“Losing my dad and my two sisters in less than a month…” she told AFP, trailing off.

Her voice broke and she laughed nervously, opting to read from a prepared statement because she knew it would be hard to speak.

“Nobody was prepared to see how, in a matter of days, a family table was left empty,” she said.

While the Hondius outbreak has left three people dead, it has yet to surpass the Epuyen outbreak, which recorded 34 cases and 11 fatalities between December 2018 and March 2019 in the town of 2,400 residents, situated in a part of the Andes where hantavirus is endemic.

Mailen’s father, Aldo Valle, came down with it after attending a birthday party.

“The person with the virus was just sitting at the same table as my dad. And at that table there were several people who got infected, and people died,” Mailen recalled.

The wake for Valle was another locus of infection, where all three of his daughters got sick.

One sister died “within hours” of showing symptoms, while for the other, “we had to take her to the cemetery without a wake,” Mailen said.

Pre-Covid isolation

The variant of the hantavirus suspected in both outbreaks is transmitted through the droppings, saliva and urine of the Andean mouse.

Jorge Diaz, an epidemiologist with Chubut province’s health department who worked on the Epuyen hantavirus outbreak, told AFP that “we knew very little about the disease” in 2018.

Human-to-human transmission of hantavirus was first discovered in 1996 in the neighboring town of El Bolson, and it was later found to have happened in Epuyen.

“We implemented quarantine, which required those who made contact with a positive case to isolate for 45 days,” Diaz explained.

About 100 people ended up undergoing the quarantine process in a display that would foreshadow the Covid-19 pandemic that broke out a year later.

The approach, dubbed “selective isolation,” marked a shift in the epidemiological response, and now “each time there is a case of (Andes) hantavirus, isolation is ordered or recommended.”

‘One thing after another’