A cruise ship called the MV Hondius set sail from Ushuaia, Argentina, with 147 people aboard. According to reports, the ship is unlike others. It is not the jolly kind with swimming pools and other amusements. The restaurant and bar are not open around the clock.
It is, rather, a cruise ship catering mainly to older, disciplined travellers. Its main purpose is educational tourism: visits to Antarctica and other exotic places to observe nature. It also has strict protocols on board, including sanitising shoes when passengers embark and disembark at ports of call.
Unbeknown to the passengers, some among them might have boarded while incubating hantavirus. Reports indicate that the likely index couple had travelled through parts of Argentina and Chile before boarding in Ushuaia.
By the time the alarm was raised, three deaths had been linked to the outbreak, with several more confirmed or suspected cases under investigation.
A Dutch woman later died in hospital in Johannesburg after disembarking at Saint Helena; a British passenger was treated in South Africa; and other patients were evacuated to Europe after the ship’s stop near Cape Verde.
Experts say hantavirus is usually transmitted through contact with infected rodents or their urine, saliva and droppings, especially when contaminated particles become airborne.
It was recently in the news when Betsy Arakawa, the wife of actor Gene Hackman, died of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome in New Mexico in 2025.
In most settings, hantavirus is not supposed to be transmitted from human to human. But, like many facts of life, there are exceptions. And this case appears to go against the general belief.
The Andes variant is the only known hantavirus strain with documented human-to-human transmission. That transmission is understood to be rare and usually limited to close, prolonged contact.
That is the strain suspected in the cruise ship outbreak. Amid the speculation about spread, contagion and safety, the World Health Organisation (WHO) director-general and other health authorities had to make clear that the risk of wider transmission remained low.
The aim was to calm a world unsettled by the prospect of another potentially transmissible disease. The world remains deeply affected by the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 to 2023, which brought lockdowns and border closures, caused millions of confirmed deaths globally and left deep scars on emotions, mental health and economies.
The memory of that shock shapes how governments and publics react to any new outbreak with even a hint of international spread.
After such a global epidemic, one would have expected protocols to be strengthened, solidarity reinforced and future global health threats met with collaborative resolve. If not out of solidarity, then at least to prevent global contagion.
That would have been a policy of enlightened self-interest. What really happened was the opposite. The WHO, the mother agency for global health protection, was weakened just when the world needed a stronger global sentinel.
The organisation’s approved programme budget for 2024–2025 stands at $6.834 billion (about R112bn) but financing strains have grown sharper, not lighter. WHO reported a financing gap of $564 million as of September 2024.
The decision by WHO members to increase assessed contributions by 20% in the 2024–2025 budget and again in the 2026–2027 budget is important in replenishing a dwindling voluntary contribution base that has historically averaged only 12% to 16% of the organisation’s total budget.
The WHO has been caught in the whirlwind of the love-hate relationship some member states have cultivated with the United Nations system they helped establish after World War II to prevent global calamities.
In the ensuing drama, voluntary contributions to UN agencies, funds and programmes have dwindled. Staff and resources at WHO have become casualties as well and its role as vanguard against global epidemics has been enfeebled.
Many well-rooted bilateral programmes, such as those of USAid, which contributed enormously to the maintenance of the global health and epidemic sentinel, were also dismantled or abruptly cut back, leading the WHO to issue guidance to countries on how to prioritise limited health resources.
In early 2025, the US administration moved to eliminate about 5 800 of the 6 200 multi-year USAid contract awards it reviewed, affecting programmes tied to malaria, tuberculosis, nutrition, maternal and child health and epidemic preparedness.
The multilateral framework is weakened and bilateral programmes have been slashed. This has left the world uncertain. The refusal to allow the cruise ship to dock in Cape Verde is an expression of the post-Covid-19 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from which the world suffers.
No country, particularly a developing one with meagre resources devoted to health, is certain that it will be met with global solidarity if there is an outbreak of a disease of catastrophic proportions within its borders.
The realisation that borders were shut and available resources restricted and confined to a few countries in the initial stages of the Covid-19 outbreak remains vivid.
Ports of call that could have given relief and comfort to the stricken ship had their own post-Covid caution for good reason: they doubted the availability of global solidarity should hantavirus prove to be another easily spread disease.
They worried about the effect on their populations and the effect on their politics, for what might be construed not as an act of global solidarity but as political miscalculation.
If Covid has taught the world any lesson, it should be that we must band together and address global health issues with a spirit of solidarity. Our fates are intertwined.
We should recommit to resourcing global organisations such as WHO to rebuild confidence in the global health network, the global health sentinel that protects us all.
That is the only way we can cure ourselves of the post-Covid PTSD. In an interconnected world, each country for itself spells doom for the entire world.
Anthony Ohemeng-Boamah is a staff member of the UN Development Programme. He is an expert on helping countries overcome development challenges.
The memory of the Covid-19 shock shapes how governments and publics react to any new outbreak with even a hint of international spread
