Two individuals who disembarked the ship at the center of the hantavirus outbreak are being transported to Emory University’s Serious Communicable Diseases Unit in eastern Atlanta, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told the Georgia Department of Public Health on Monday.
"Federal health care workers are taking every precaution needed in each of these cases, and there is no risk to the public at this time," DPH said in a news release.
Emory University Hospital said one of the two patients is symptomatic and receiving care in Emory’s biocontainment unit, and the other is asymptomatic, undergoing evaluation and monitoring.
Early symptoms of hantavirus infection include fever, chills, myalgia (muscle aches), headaches, and gastrointestinal symptoms and can become complicated by acute respiratory distress syndrome, respiratory failure and shock. The case fatality rate is 35%. Most cases occur west of the Mississippi River; the disease is not endemic in Georgia, according to DPH.
There are nearly 40 strains of hantavirus found all over the world, and different strains cause different illnesses, but the rare Andes strain is the only one known to cross from human to human. More often, spread occurs from feces or urine from rodents, particularly rats and mice, according to the CDC.
In the past 30 years that DPH has been collecting data, fewer than 900 cases were reported, Emory University epidemiologist Jodie Guest said last week.
"Normally, we consider the hantavirus a dead-end virus, meaning one person gets it from a rodent, and then that is the only person who will get it," Guest said. "This will not become a global pandemic. The transmission does not work effectively that way."
The way hantavirus transmits is not the same as the flu or coronavirus, chief epidemiologist and an infectious disease expert at University of Florida Health Shands Hospital Nicole M. Iovine said in a news release.
"These viruses affect the upper airways, mainly, so speaking and coughing can easily transmit it,” she said. "The hantavirus and the Andes virus tend to infect very deep in the lungs, so it is not as easily transmitted through the air."
There is no licensed specific antiviral treatment or vaccine for hantavirus infection, according to the World Health Organization. Care is supportive and focuses on close clinical monitoring and management of respiratory, cardiac and kidney complications. Early access to intensive care, when clinically indicated, improves outcomes, particularly for patients with hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome.
Gov. Brian Kemp commented Monday on the move to Emory.
"If you were one of those passengers that was stranded, especially if you are from Georgia, you would want your state to come to your aid and that's exactly what we're going to do," Kemp said. "And there's nobody better to handle that than the folks at Emory. You think about how they've dealt with folks that had Ebola that had been transported back here."
