GRIF MAG

A suspected hantavirus outbreakaboard acruise shiphas claimed three lives and left seven others ill.

TheWorld Health Organization(WHO) said that detailed investigations are currently underway into the incident, including extensive laboratory testing and epidemiological studies to understand the virus's spread.

Sequencing of the virus from the current outbreak is also ongoing.

Hantaviruses, which have been present for centuries, have a documented history of outbreaks across Asia and Europe.

In the Eastern Hemisphere, these viruses have been associated with severe conditions such as haemorrhagic fever and kidney failure.

A distinct group of hantaviruses emerged in the early 1990s in the southwestern United States, leading to the acute respiratory disease now known as hantavirus pulmonary syndrome.

The disease garnered significant attention in 2025 followingthe death of Betsy Arakawa, wife of actorGene Hackman, froma hantavirus infection in New Mexico.

What is hantavirus?

Hantavirus is mainly spread by contact with rodents or their urine, saliva or droppings, particularly when the material is disturbed and becomes airborne, posing a risk of inhalation.

People are typically exposed to hantavirus around their homes, cabins or sheds, especially when cleaning out enclosed spaces with little ventilation or going into areas where there are mouse droppings.

The WHO says that while rare, hantaviruses may spread between people.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began tracking the virus after a 1993 outbreak in the Four Corners region – the area where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet.

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It was a doctor with the Indian Health Service who first noticed a pattern of deaths among young patients, said Michelle Harkins, a pulmonologist with the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center who for years has been studying the disease and helping patients.

Most US cases are in Western states. New Mexico and Arizona are hotspots, Dr Harkins said, likely because the odds are greater for mouse-human encounters in rural areas.

Symptoms of hantavirus

An infection can rapidly progress and become life-threatening. Experts say it can start with symptoms that can include:

• fever

• chills

• muscle aches

• headache

“Early in the illness, you really may not be able to tell the difference between hantavirus and having the flu,” said Dr Sonja Bartolome of UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

Symptoms of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome usually show between one to eight weeks after contact with an infected rodent. As the infection progresses, patients might experience tightness in the chest, as the lungs fill with fluid.

The other syndrome caused by hantavirus — hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome — usually develops within a week or two after exposure.

Death rates vary depending on which hantavirus causes the illness. Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome is fatal in nearly 40 per cent of people infected, while the death rate for hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome varies from 1 per cent to 15 per cent of patients, according to the CDC.

How to prevent hantavirus

There is no specific treatment or cure, but early medical attention can increase the chance of survival.

Despite years of research, Dr Harkins said that many questions have yet to be answered, including why it can be mild for some people and very severe for others and how antibodies are developed. She and other researchers have been following patients over long periods of time in hopes of finding a treatment.

“A lot of mysteries,” she said, noting that what researchers do know is that rodent exposure is a key.

The best way to avoid the germ is to minimise contact with rodents and their droppings. Use protective gloves and a bleach solution for cleaning up rodent droppings.

Public health experts caution against sweeping or vacuuming, which can cause the virus to get into the air.

“I would say they were the six of the happiest years of my working life.” The velvet voice is just as I remember it. Chris Rea may have spent the majority of his 82 years living in England, but the warmth of his Dundonian accent still resonates as it did four decades earlier when he was a regular fixture for rugby supporters – including me – across the country as presenter ofBBC’sRugby Specialprogramme.

They were the best of times. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, rugby union was edging slowly but inexorably towards professionalism but the players were still amateurs with rich life stories to tell. The programme captured those with intimacy and colour, while providing highlights of the best of the club game and the international stage and offered a platform to debate major talking points.

Even now, hearing the first few bars of the show’s theme tune (quiz night answer, it wasHoly Mackerelby the Shadows’ drummer, Brian Bennett) evokes memories of mud-soaked Sunday afternoons on the unmissable highlights show on BBC Two.

Rea, the former Headingley, Scotland andBritish and Irish Lionscentre, was at the heart of it, presenting the show in its heyday years between 1988 and 1994. He remembers it all like it was yesterday.

“We were opposite theAntiques Roadshow[on BBC One] and followedSki Sunday,” Rea recalls, with a chuckle, from his home in a village near Newmarket. “It was a wonderful time. I am so chuffed you remember it because it’s very tempting to believe that none of the current generation of players think that rugby existed before 1995. It was great fun. In our day, the game was for the players... Now, of course, the game is about entertainment.”

Rea had found great joy himself as a player, winning 13 caps forScotland. He scored a try (which features on the classic video101 Best Tries) in what is regarded as one of the greatest games ever played in the old Five Nations: Wales’ 19-18 victory at Murrayfield played in front of an estimated crowd of 90,000.

In the final round of the championship, he famously scored the last-gasp winning try in the 16-15 victory against England at Twickenham, their first in 33 years. Just a week later he starred in another victory over England, this time at Murrayfield in the centenary match to mark the first match between the two sides, at Raeburn in 1871.

Later that year Rea, whose middle names are “William Wallace”, was selected for the Lions’ historic tour of New Zealand, making 10 appearances and scoring three tries against provincial sides, with the Test side clinching the series 2-1.

Lions’ tours in those days lasted four months, and when he returned Rea, who was then working for the BBC as an administrator in Leeds – where he had played for Headingley alongside the then England captain John Spencer and Sir Ian McGeechan – retired from the game.

He was posted to London and offered a six-month attachment to the BBC Radio sports department. The six months lasted nine years. Seeking new challenges in the media, Rea was appointed rugby and golf correspondent ofThe Scotsmanin Edinburgh but Johnnie Watherston, brother of former Scotland flanker Rory, was appointed to head up the BBC’s director and producer of rugby programmes, approached him to start doing some interviews forRugby Special,he had no hesitation in accepting. It would prove a life-changing moment, but one that ultimately ended in difficult circumstances.

“At the time, Nigel Starmer-Smith was having to do everything – he was interviewing people, he was doing the presentation from places like the ladies’ toilet at Orrell, and it was all done on a Saturday night. At the timeRugby Specialwas probably the graveyard shift, if you were working on it, you probably knew you were not going to become the BBC’s director general.

“Then Johnnie Watherston was appointed and he asked me if I would do a few interviews. One thing led to another and he asked if I would think of presenting the programme. I told him nothing would give me greater pleasure but that I won’t be doing it on a freezing Saturday night outside the clubhouse at Orrell or Harlequins or wherever, and stitching things together. Johnnie did a tremendous job persuading Jonathan Martin, who was the head of sport, that if we were going to build this programme up, it had to be studio-based, with guests, news from overseas and it had to be presented the following day.

“We had a fantastic producer called Sue Roberts who came up with brilliant ideas and features, and the programme was transformed from something pretty basic, and the audience figures started to go up and up and up.”

Rea recalls taking a call from the late Malcolm Pearce, the former newspaper wholesaler and farmer who was the benefactor that helped establish the great Bath side of the 1980s and 1990s.

“Malcolm was the start of the great Bath sides and would give players like Mike Catt and Gareth Chilcott genuine jobs and built up the team,” Rea added. “He phoned me up one day and said ‘Chris, I have got a young lad here who is definitely going to go to rugby league because he is a bricklayer at the moment. But we would love to keep him at Bath and wondered if you might be able to do something on him. His name is Jeremy Guscott.’

“I asked what his interests were and Malcolm said he was a very good-looking guy and he loved clothes. I took it to Johnnie, and he came up with the idea of bringing in the people who producedThe Clothes Showand giving Guscott a big make-over. It was hilarious. Malcolm had said that Guscott was “very shy” – how things change – so he decided to get Chilcott, who was most definitely not shy, to drive him up, and be his minder. It was like something out of the showStars in Your Eyeswhen the guests would say ‘Tonight Matthew, I am going to be…’ Guscott went off and came back a changed man, preening in this gorgeous outfit. It was one of the funniest and most successful programmes.

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“Another memorable feature took us to St Andrew’s University to do a feature with Damian Hopley, who was studying there, and Neil Back, who was an incredible athlete. Back had been told at the time that he was too small for top international honours, but his argument that extra weight would adversely affect his speed and ball-playing skills, which he expressed forcefully on the programme, won the day. They were great days.

“The days when the game was for the players, not the spectators. When Jonathan Webb, the England full-back, who had a shocker against France at Twickenham, was given a hero’s ovation at Cardiff the next week after it was revealed that he had been performing a surgical operation and had not slept for 36 hours before the French game. The players were amateurs and it was accepted that theyhad other things that occupied their lives.”

TheRugby Specialaudiences soared. When Cornwall defeated Yorkshire in the county championship in 1991, Rea says the audience forRugby Specialthe following day hit two million viewers – from a low-point of 200,000 before the overhaul – and when England beat New Zealand at Twickenham in 1993, it reached 2.2 million.

Yet by far the greatest achievement of all is the fact that for a full year of broadcasting, Rea was secretly undergoing cancer treatment having been diagnosed with bowel, liver and lymph node cancer, having been told in 1993 that he only had a five per cent survival chance within the next five years if the surgery was not successful.

“Thirty-three years ago, that was a death sentence,” he recalls. “I am only here because of a specialist bowel colorectal surgeon called Alan Wells. I underwent surgery in the Fitzwilliam Hospital in Peterborough. I had to go privately to get a certain type of chemotherapy treatment that had just come from the US and was successfully trialled there.”

Instead of a short course of chemo, his treatment lasted 52 weeks. “I said I would do it if I could keep going with the programme,” he added. “They said I wouldn’t lose what hair I had left but would put on weight. We came to an agreement that if there was any change to my physical state, then I would be the first to say, ‘this is not on.’ You can’t have someone looking like death warmed up presenting a sports programme.

“I felt dreadful every Monday and for a couple days after but by the end of the week I was okay. I put weight on because of the effect of the steroids, but nobody would have known, and that was a source of great pride.”

His treatment was ongoing when he travelled to New Zealand in 1993 for the Lions tour, which back then involved covering 13 matches over three months.

“I went off with a suitcase full of drugs and I remember thinking, ‘How am I going to work this?’ The staff at the Fitzwilliam told me that whatever town I arrived in, I had to contact the nearest hospital. I remember my first one, sitting in a pretty basic waiting room and being greeted by a trainee nurse. At the Fitzwilliam, I was treated as a star patient because no-one had ever been through the 52-week treatment. Apparently they had been using the treatment for years in New Zealand. I was staggered.”

Earlier that year Bobby Moore died of a similar condition, and even now Rea thinks about how lucky he was to survive. “I remember thinking I should have been more grateful to the Almighty, but I had an 11-year-old daughter and a family to look after, so I had to keep working.”

The elation of going into remission, however, was later replaced with the acute disappointment when he was told the following year that the production ofRugby Specialwas going to be outsourced to an independent company and that his services would no longer be required.

“I was devastated. Johnnie lost his job too. I hadn’t sought any additional support from the BBC during my illness. It was a real blow for me. I was sorry thatRugby Specialdid go downhill a bit and they took it a different way. That’s fine, you always get to the end of a success story and things need changing, but I think it was the BBC that lost interest in rugby more than anything else. It was also a result and a consequence of professionalism.”

After losing his presenting job with the BBC, he was part of ITV’s commentary team at the 1995 World Cup in South Africa, which he ranks along with England’s victory in 2003 as the two best tournaments. As rugby correspondent forThe Independent on Sunday, he also was not afraid to make a stand in the early days of professionalism, putting him at odds with the club owners by advocating former RFU chairman Chris Brittle’s unsuccessful vision for the top players in England to be offered central contracts by the RFU. He feels England are still paying the price now.

“I think that despite the fantastic resources in playing numbers and funding, I would very much doubt if England would have one player in a composite Six Nations side this season and that is terrible, really,” added Rea, who went on to work for the International Rugby Board [now World Rugby] as it head of communications.

“I say that not because I am a Scot, far from it because I have spent most of my life down here and enjoyed England’s three great sides – Billy Beaumont’s, Will Carling’s and the 2003 World Cup side. At the time Fran Cotton and Clive Woodward were fully supportive of the Brittle plan because they realised that going down the club route was always going to be a problem.

“The idea was that the clubs would retain their identity and support, but that the top players would be to the RFU and the primacy of the international game was paramount. In my view that hasn’t changed. Every time England take the field, they should be favourites, like New Zealand. They should have an aura about them. I think it is vital for the world game that England – and I say this as a Scot – are always up there. Just getting to finals is not enough. The 2003 final was compelling. It was wonderful but they have never really regained that aura of invincibility.”

If anyone asks Timothy Spall to describe what actors actually do, he often finds himself lost for words. “Partly because of the ineffable nature of it,” he says. “But also because, if you don’t watch out, you can end up sounding like a big pseud. Pretentious. You can overcomplicate it.”

It’s hard to imagine the avuncular, easygoing Spall popping up in Pseuds Corner. Perhaps this is why he is having so much fun playing the reclusive retired thespian John Chapel in theBBC’s crime caperDeath Valley, which returns for a second series on Sunday. Chapel played a fictional detective on TV, and so finds himself assisting Gwyneth Keyworth’s daffy copper each time a murder disrupts the calm of their rural Welsh life, which naturally happens with preposterous frequency. Chapel is prone to giving grandiloquent masterclasses on the art of acting, and Spall takes evident pleasure in his actorly affectation and plummy delivery, rolling vowels around like marbles.

“I do like to expose the weakness in a man,” he says casually. “We have in this country a wonderful ability to create characters that are both annoying and at the centre of things. Characters likeAlan Partridgeor David Brent.” Why does he think this is? “I dunno, but it goes back to Shakespeare’s mechanicals. Characters who are extremely conceited, and yet your heart breaks for them.”

Spall is, unsurprisingly, the best thing in the knowingly glibDeath Valley, despite comedy – even the off-centre humour on offer here – not really being his thing. “It’s not something I tend to do,” he says. Indeed,cosy crime– that pernicious species modelled onMidsomer Murdersand now all over the TV schedules like bindweed – is even less his thing.

“I don’t watch them,” he admits. “It’s not really my cup of tea.” It’s tempting to wonder whether he accepted the role of Chapel because he needed a bit of light relief after playing the tormented academic Peter Farquhar, allegedly murdered by his student Ben Field, in the BBC’s gruelling true crime dramaThe Sixth Commandment(he is unable to talk about this series sinceField’s conviction was recently quashedby the Court of Appeal, and a retrial has been ordered). “Well, just because things look like light relief on TV, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are any less difficult to do. It’s all hard as far as I’m concerned. Acting is not something that you learn once and then know how to do it.”

Instead, the 69-year-old Spall thrives on regarding each role as a bit of a challenge. A series of formidable parts – JMW Turner in Mike Leigh’sMr Turner(2014); Holocaust denier David Irving inDenial(2016); Ulster Unionist leader Ian Paisley inThe Journey(2016)– have pegged out his transition from quirky supporting character actor (including Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter franchise) to leading man. Does the weight of playing these more extreme characters ever take its toll? “Not really. Although not that I would know. There’s a very funny instance when my wife Shane [they married in 1981 and have three children, including the actorRafe Spall] and I were talking to a friend of an acquaintance, who asked me whether I ever took my work home with me. And I said absolutely not, and Shane said, ‘Absolutely’, at exactly the same time.”

He’s unacquainted with the concept of drama therapy – the support service increasingly deployed in theatre and film to help actors deal with the psychological toll of playing demanding parts. “Never heard of it,” he says breezily. “For me, the beauty of being another character is that I’m not using it as therapy. I don’t want to be pretentious here, but when you act, you put a ring around your character. It’s not about your emotions. But I can see how these new tools grow out of good intent.”

Naturally, much in the industry has changed since he graduated from Rada in 1978. Spall, who is liberal-minded by nature, tries his best to keep up with shifting attitudes. “I’ve got three children and eight grandchildren, so not a lot feels new to me,” he says. (Alongside Rafe, he and Shane also have two daughters, Pascale, a primary school teacher, and Mercedes, a textile designer). “I’ve grown up with it. And there’s no point being reactionary if you can help it. I know some people can be sensitive about pronouns, but I’ve never seen that as being an annoying thing.”

But he’s not a fan of everything. Take behaviour codes on set, for example. “I’ve been around a long time. And you think, ‘Are these new conversations about how to behave on set happening because someone cares, or because it’s now a legal requirement?’ I don’t like it when something pretends to be something it’s not.”

Has he ever witnessed bad behaviour in this environment? “I never saw anybody being abused – nothing like that. OK, maybe some of the language was a bit fruity. But I was never familiar with it. Although I’m not really in the world of casting couches. If I’d been an attractive young woman, then I might have had a different story.”

He’s suspicious too of the quickness to take offence. “I can’t abide this taste for outrage. It’s so easy these days to get annoyed about things, but it’s such an easy option to take. Obviously, there are people with serious axes to grind about serious issues, but you also get the sense that there is a taste for jumping on bandwagons, and a yearning for something destructive to happen.

“There is very little forgiveness and understanding and very little ability to see the full story. Because for a lot of people it’s too entertaining.” He is warming to his theme. “For those on the receiving end, they never get a hearing when the police, the judge and the hangman are all on social media. A lot of people have been destroyed.”

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Is he, I wonder, thinking ofScott Mills, the Radio 1 DJ who was recently sacked by the BBC over a historic sexual assault allegation, which he denied and which was not proceeded with by police? “Well, that’s a different thing. I’ve heard that this sort of thing [when public opinion isn’t involved] is called silent cancelling. And [Mills] is difficult to talk about because I don’t know anything about it. But that’s not really what I mean. I’m talking about the [public] taste for it.”

Spall frequently works with the BBC. Fifteen years ago, he presented three travel documentaries that followed him and Shane on a barge as they travelled around the British coastline. In 2024, he appeared inThe Mirror and the Light, the concluding instalment in the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’sWolf Halltrilogy.

Before filming, the decision was made to cut severalWolf Hallscenes for budgetary reasons; more recently, it has been reported that a planned adaptation ofDouglas Stuart’s Booker-winning novelShuggie Bainis delayed because of a lack of available funding. Does Spall fear for the BBC’s ability to continue producing quality drama given the financial challenges it faces?

“It’s another shifting environment,” he says. “There’s definitely less budget. They are cutting back and back, and the budget for a BBC drama today is the same as the catering budget for something [on one of the streamers]. The BBC is our calling card, a totem that we used to dance around, and it set the model for the mix of documentaries and drama that the streamers all now follow. But because of the competition, it’s getting nipped and nipped. And you wonder for how long this can be sustained. Yet somehow it still comes up with great work.”

He wonders whether part of the problem lies in the BBC’s conflicted identity. “It’s independent, but also on some level answerable to government. It’s a bit like the Royal family – it’s both incredibly powerful and yet has no power at all. And, like the Royal family, we all have an opinion on it. But what I do know is that 50p a day brings you things like the BBC Symphony Orchestra.”

Spall is so easygoing that I find myself sometimes forgetting to ask him actual questions. His initial greeting is disarming: “Hi, I’m Tim,” he says, as though there is a real possibility I might not know who he is. He has the lazy Cockney drawl of someone who has just stepped out of a London boozer – not because he sounds drunk (he no longer drinks) but because he has never pretended to be anyone other than who he is: a working-class South Londoner whose mother was a hairdresser and father was a postman.

Much has been made of his unconventional looks – his crooked tooth, which he has never succumbed to correcting, his long, sloping jowls, which can give him the wounded appearance of a whipped dog. “You’ve played a lot of fat slobs, haven’t you?” Jonathan Ross once said to him. But it’s water off a duck’s back to Spall, who has carved out a vintage career from mining the hidden ambiguities beneath the most unlikely surfaces.

“Fate created me in such a way that I don’t fit the bill as an actor who has to represent a certain wish-fulfilment type,” he says. “Because the pressure of having to be that is enormous. Marlon Brando struggled with that all his life. It’s why he put on so much weight after he retired. Before that, he had the diet of the jockey.”

Spall, too, has lost a lot of weight after slimming down for a role in 2015’sThe Enfield Hauntings– and is very careful with what he eats. He is trim and sprightly, wearing a nifty waistcoat beneath his jacket, and with age seems to have grown into the unusual contours of his face. He joshes with the waitress over his cappuccino: “I’d like it skinny please, and scaldingly hot – illegally hot”. In another man, this would be flirty. With him, it simply sounds charming.

The question of how to live a good life preoccupies him a lot. He thinks deeply about contentious subjects such as assisted dying and the state of affairs in Trump’s America. Often, he realises he doesn’t know exactly what he thinks. “But what I find disconcerting is being made to feel nervous about not taking a side, and about sitting on the fence,” he says. “Or about being open-minded and seeing both sides. Some people find that offensive. And I don’t know where to go with that.” He reads an awful lot about morality. “I spend a lot of time wondering what it’s all about. Of course, you know I had a run-in, don’t you, when I was 39?”

This is Spall’s way of describing his near-death encounter with acute myeloid leukaemia, which left his life hanging in the balance for several appalling weeks. Since this episode, Spall has taken a serious interest in theology, behaviour and mysticism. “You ask yourself the big questions when something like that happens. I read a lot of Aldous Huxley, I loveThe Perennial Philosophy[Huxley’s 1945 comparative study of mysticism]. I want to know why we’re here and how best we should behave.” His encroaching years have only accelerated his interest. “Of course, at my age, you’re that much closer to not sticking around.”

He tends to take each role as it comes. “There is a word in the canon that keeps every actor humble,” he says. “And that word is ‘unemployment’.” Surely Spall is not plagued by this? He has worked consistently for decades. “Yes, but the reality is, after each job finishes, and if I don’t know what’s coming up next, I feel like I’m never going to work again. Even though logic tells me this is probably unlikely.” Talent and success, it seems, are no defence against pathological insecurity. “Oh no, never. With each job, it always feels like I’ve been rumbled.”

Death Valley is on BBC One and iPlayer on Sunday, 17 May at 8.15pm

Former Late Show host David Letterman is returning as one of Stephen Colbert's final guests.

Key Points

• Colbert will also reunite with Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers.

• The series is set to end on May 21.

They'reno pope, but these guys will do.

AsStephen Colbertprepares to say goodbye toThe Late Show, he's set to reunite with his predecessor and his former podcast cohosts.

Ahead of his final show on May 21, Colbert will kick off his second to last week on Monday, May 11, by welcoming fellow late-nights hosts Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver, a.k.a. theStrike Force Five. During the 2023 WGA strike, Colbert and his colleagues came together for a 12-episode podcast series, with the proceeds going to their employees, who were out of work as their shows went dark.

Then, on May 14, Colbert will be joined by originalLate Showhost David Letterman, who passed the franchise on to Colbert upon his retirement in 2015.

Last summer,CBS announcedthe cancellation of Colbert's iteration and the end of the show's historic 33-year run. "We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable and will retireThe Late Showfranchise at that time," the network said in a statement, adding that the surprising move was "purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night."

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Reports have suggested that the network was losing upward of $40 million a year on the production. Many skeptics, however, have pointed to Skydance Media acquiring Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, as a cause, saying the new leadership wanted to stay out of the crossfire of President Donald Trump.

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with ourEW Dispatch newsletter.

Letterman recently made headlines with his claim thatColbert was "dumped"so that he didn't make any more "trouble" for CBS. "I'm just going to go on record as saying: They're lying," Letterman declared in aNew York Timesinterview on Tuesday. "Let me just add one other thing... They're lying weasels."

In addition to Letterman and theStrike Force Fivecrew, the penultimate week ofLate Showguests will include Pedro Pascal, Billy Crystal, Ina Garten, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Tom Hanks.

Read the original article onEntertainment Weekly

What's next for those aboard hantavirus cruise ship? 03:06

Three patients suspected ofhaving the hantaviruswere evacuated from the MV Hondius cruise ship and were on their way to the Netherlands for medical care, the World Health Organization said Wednesday. The three are German, Dutch and British nationals, including a British crew member, according to the WHO.

The rare outbreak of the virus has killed three people from the cruise.

The cruise operator, Oceanwide Expeditions, said in astatementWednesday night that a medical aircraft carrying two of the patients landed in the Netherlands, and that a second aircraft is currently experiencing a delay. The person on the second aircraft is in stable condition. Oceanwide Expeditions didn't give details on the cause of the delay and said it would provide an update on the arrival as soon as possible.

The U.K. Health Security Agency confirmed in astatementWednesday that one British national had been evacuated from the cruise ship to receive care in the Netherlands. The UKHSA also said it's aware of two other people who were aboard the MV Hondius and have since independently returned to the U.K. Neither is currently reporting symptoms, and they've been advised to self-isolate, the agency said in its statement, adding: "The risk to the general public remains very low."

In the latest twist in the ordeal for the roughly 150 passengers, the Spanish government reaffirmed on Wednesday what it initially announced the previous day, saying the vessel would dock in the Canary Islands, despite the head of the local government rejecting the plan earlier in the day.

In its statement Wednesday night, Oceanwide Expeditions also confirmed that the cruise ship departed Cape Verde and is heading north en route to the Canary Islands, a trip which is expected to take three to four days.

The plan announced Tuesday, coordinated between the Spanish government and the WHO, had been for the ship to head to the Canary Islands for a "full investigation" and "full inspection" after the three patients were evacuated. But the leader of the archipelago's regional government, Fernando Clavijo, rejected the idea Wednesday morning, saying he had requested a meeting with Spain's socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

In a social media post, Clavijo, a member of Spain's conservative political opposition, wrote: "The Canary Islands always acts with responsibility, but it cannot accept decisions taken behind the backs of the Canary Islands institutions and without sufficient information to the population."

At a later news conference, however, Spain's health minister Monica Garcia Gomez doubled down on the plan, saying the ship would dock at Granadilla on the Canary island of Tenerife, "within three days."

"A joint system for health assessment and evacuation will be put in place to repatriate all passengers, unless their medical condition prevents it," she told reporters.

On Wednesday, José Domingo Regalado, the mayor of Granadilla de Abona in Tenerife, rejected the arrival of the MV Hondius at the industrial and logistics port of the municipality, saying the move goes "against what is desired."

"What we ask is that action be taken, since they can be transferred to the nearest airport to their countries of origin so that they can quarantine and be treated by their health system if they require it. And also, especially, that the ship is disinfected on the high seas and not moved to a port where there is a local population nearby," he said.

Regarding Clavijo's earlier comments on the plan, Gomez said she had been in "constant contact" with Clavijo and that he would be involved in all meetings.

A flight that had been planned to evacuate the ship's doctor, who was showing symptoms, to the Canary Islands was canceled early Wednesday, a source close to the regional presidency told the French news agency AFP.

Spain's health ministryannounced laterthat the sick individuals would instead be treated in the Netherlands.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, acting director for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in astatementWednesday night that the CDC has been "coordinating with domestic and international partners" since it learned of the outbreak.

The CDC was "preparing medical support" for all Americans aboard the cruise ship, Bhattacharya disclosed. Oceanwide Expeditions has said there are 17 American passengers still aboard the Hondius.

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Two Georgia residentswho werepassengers on the Hondius, but have since returned to Georgia, are being monitored but have shown no signs so far of infection, the Georgia Department of Health reported Wednesday.

"The safety and health of the affected American travelers is our number one goal," Bhattacharya said.

South African authorities confirmed on Wednesday that they had identified the so-calledAndes strain of the hantavirusin two people who had previously been on the cruise. The Andes strain, which is found primarily in Argentina and Chile, can be transmitted from human to human, unlike other strains of the virus.

Swiss authorities announced Wednesday that a man who previously traveled on the ship and returned home at the end of April hadalso tested positive for the Andes strainof the virus, adding that there was "currently no risk to the Swiss public."

The French Ministry of Health, meanwhile, told the country'sBFM TVnetwork a French "contact case" had been confirmed. The man is believed to have traveled on the same flight as one of the two patients evacuated to Johannesburg for treatment in late April.

There is currently one British national in intensive care in South Africa after being on the cruise, but the French authorities were likely referring to the other patient evacuated to Johannesburg, a 69-year-old Dutch woman who the WHO said got off the ship with "gastrointestinal symptoms" on April 24 and died two days later after her condition "deteriorated during a flight to Johannesburg."

That brings the total number of suspected or confirmed cases to nine, including three who have died, five confirmed as receiving treatment and the French man, about whom few details have been given.

Oceanwide Expeditions said two infectious disease specialists were heading Wednesday from the Netherlands to the cruise and would "remain with the vessel after its anticipated departure from Cape Verde."

The Dutch-flagged MV Hontius, a luxury cruise liner, left Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1. It has been anchored off Cape Verde, an island off Africa's west coast in the Atlantic, since Sunday.

Argentina's health ministry said in a statement Wednesday that it was reconstructing the itinerary of the Dutch couple, who had traveled through southern Argentina and Chile before the expedition. It will also conduct rodent capture and analysis in Ushuaia, the statement said.

So far, no cases associated with the outbreak had been identified in Argentina, the health ministry said.

Ann Lindstrand, the WHO representative in Cape Verde, told CBS News' Ramy Inocencio on Tuesday that there was no risk of a pandemic-level threat with the hantavirus given the low likelihood of human-to-human transmission.

Bhattacharya echoed that guidance Wednesday, saying that hantavirus "is not spread by people without symptoms, transmission requires close contact, and the risk to the American public is very low."

Spanish and Dutch authorities are "intensely discussing" what will happen next to the passengers on the ship, she said. They have been told to remain in their cabins as much as possible.

"If there is the need for a quarantine, that will be a decision of the health authorities in Spain or Holland at that point in time, with the close collaboration with the advice of WHO," Lindstrand said.

If needed, a quarantine could last as long as two months, since the incubation period for hantavirus is between one and eight weeks, she added, noting that "eight weeks is a horribly long time to be in quarantine."

Lindstrand said she was in contact with a volunteer doctor on the boat who told her the passengers were "coping surprisingly well," though they were anxious to know what their next port of call would be.

"We have heard from quite a few people on the boat," Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, said Tuesday. "We just want you to know we are working with the ship's operators. We are working with the countries where you are from. We hear you. We know that you are scared."