Italian hospital to screen samples of man in hantavirus quarantine

ROME, May 12 (Reuters) – Italy’s top infectious diseases hospital said on Tuesday it would examine biological samples from a man in quarantine having come into contact with a woman who died of Hantavirus.

The ANSA news agency had previously reported that the man – a 25-year-old from the southern Calabria region – had been hospitalized.

He was briefly on the same plane as a woman who later died from the virus. The woman was disembarked from the KLM flight before it took off from Johannesburg.

ANSA reported earlier that the man was being transferred to the Spallanzani hospital in Rome, but the hospital later clarified that it was only awaiting his biological samples in order to analyse them.

Hantavirus is primarily spread by rodents but can be transmitted between people in rare cases, according to the World Health Organization. It usually begins with flu-like symptoms, such as fatigue and fever, one to eight weeks after exposure.

A cluster has been linked in recent days to the MV Hondius ship, which docked in Spain’s Canary Islands following a polar expedition that departed from Argentina.

The WHO has increased its tally of confirmed cases in the outbreak to nine. It said further cases could materialise because of the long incubation period, but that this was not a pandemic, and was nothing like COVID-19.

(Reporting by Angelo Amante, editing by Gavin Jones)