Hantavirus, cruise patient's virus sequenced: 'Not mutated'

The first snapshot of the Hantavirus Andes, which travelled from Argentina to Europe on board the cruise ship Mv Hondius, has arrived. The gene sequence, now freely accessible, is of the virus isolated from the patient who died in Zurich, Switzerland.

It turns out to be 99% similar to the sequence detected in Argentina in 2018 and this, at first glance, indicates that the virus would still retain its initial physiognomy, without having accumulated many mutations. This is good news because it indicates that the virus is relatively stable, which could make it less complex to track infections and, if necessary, to develop possible weapons to fight it.

"At the moment there is no evidence that this variant spreads more easily or causes more severe disease than other Andes viruses," is the confirmation from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (Ecdc) on the Hondius cruise ship-related Andes hantavirus outbreak. According to the EU agency, genetic sequencing of the virus 'strongly suggests' that the confirmed positive samples are linked to the same original source of infection.

Genomic analyses also show that the virus involved in the outbreak is similar to the Andes virus already known to circulate in South America and 'is not a new variant'. Many questions still remain open, however, and one of the main ones concerns the timing of the contagion: knowing them would be decisive for effective tracing and for indicating the duration of the quarantine, but at the moment there are no definitive answers.

 Accessible also from the GenBank of the US National Institutes of Health, the sequence was uploaded to the Virological.org platform by the Swiss National Reference Centre for Emerging Viral Infections, the University Hospitals of Geneva and the Institute of Medical Virology of the University of Zurich.