Hantavirus Cruise Passengers Being Surveilled at Home Around the Clock

Of the five people exposed to hantavirus on a cruise ship who left a Nebraska quarantine facility for their home states, two passengers went to New York, and one each went to Arizona, California, and Oregon.

At least some of them have the round-the-clock monitoring demanded by federal officials.

For the individuals who returned to New York, “there will be someone on site 24 hours a day until June 22,” a spokesperson for the state’s health department told MedPage Today.

A spokesperson for Oregon’s state health department also confirmed that there is “24/7 monitoring in place” in order to “comply with federal requirements.”

Arizona and California did not return a request for comment as of press time.

Experts have said the constant surveillance exceeds typical public health protocols. Passengers who returned from the cruise ship in April, or who were on a flight with an infected person, have been monitored by public health workers at home. There have been no reports of 24/7 surveillance for those people.

Similarly, federal officials have also been taking an unusually stringent approach to managing American healthcare workers exposed to or infected with Ebola in an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Officials planned to build a quarantine and treatment facility in Kenya before facing pushback.

At least one American doctor who was infected with the virus has already been sent to Germany for treatment, instead of being repatriated to the U.S.

The plan shook the public health community, not least because the U.S. has a network of 13 Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Centers supported by the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response that is designed to respond to high-consequence infectious diseases like Ebola; the Nebraska center is one of them. Many workers deployed in the response are uniformed services members whose job requires them to travel to the front lines.

In a letter to Congress, healthcare workers noted that people “who deploy to assist during outbreaks do so at enormous personal risk in service of global health, national security, and humanitarian response efforts. They do so with the expectation that, should they become ill, they will have access to the highest standard of care available. Policies that deny or limit access to the very systems the United States has spent years building and maintaining undermine that commitment.”

The policy also risks undermining outbreak response by “discouraging qualified personnel from deploying to the affected regions,” they wrote.

As for the hantavirus outbreak, all 18 passengers served the first 21 days of their monitoring in Nebraska at the facility’s National Quarantine Unit — with two of them receiving quarantine orders to do so.

Experts said individuals with possible exposure should be monitored for 42 days, which is thought to be near the upper limit of the virus’s incubation period. A total of 13 passengers will remain at the facility to serve out those final 3 weeks of monitoring, as they were strongly encouraged to do, according to a press release from the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Among passengers who returned home earlier, many had their last point of contact around April 24, which means their 42-day monitoring period is nearing an end.

A total of 13 cases, including three deaths, have been tied to the hantavirus outbreak.

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