Around twenty French people, who had potentially been in contact with the Dutch cruise line who died of a hantavirus infection in April, will be released from three weeks of isolation in hospital on Saturday, while the only infected French woman is still in intensive care, the Ministry of Health confirmed on Friday June 5.
“The isolation period for contact persons on international flights ends this Saturday, June 6,” indicated the Ministry of Health, the measure affecting 22 people. Four French people must, however, remain in solitary confinement until June 21. These are people who participated in the cruise on the Hondius ship, and therefore in contact with a Dutch passenger infected with hantavirus and, since, died at the end of April. A fifth French woman had been infected, the only one in the country to test positive. Hospitalized in Paris, she is still “in intensive care” in a stable condition, the ministry said.
The 22 people who will be released on Saturday were present on air flights on which the Dutch patient was a passenger, one from Saint Helena to Johannesburg, the second from the latter city. The release of these people, none of whom tested positive and who were all hospitalized in different French locations – Paris, Marseille, etc. – marks a major step in the outcome of this health episode which worried the whole world.
Strict protocol applied in France
The hantavirus, which is transmitted mainly by contact with a rodent but can then give rise to human-to-human contamination, causes very deadly respiratory infections. In the case of the Hondius cruise ship, around ten cases were recorded among passengers, including three deaths.
The French government had applied a particularly strict protocol after consulting scientific experts who were generally reassuring about the low risk of an epidemic but in favor of important precautions, even if it meant subsequently reducing the duration of isolation. The Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, reported at the end of May that justice had “validated the legality” of these decisions, while no contact case benefited from an early release.
One of the last cases still confined, due to his presence on the cruise ship, expressed his weariness in a message to journalists on Friday. “Not only are we not sick, but as long as our blood does not contain any trace of virus, we are certain not to risk transmission of the hantavirus,” assured Roland Seitre, specifying that he was not asking for an end to his confinement but for less strict conditions of isolation.
