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American officials said on Wednesday that residents in three states were being monitored for potential hantavirus infections after being aboard a Dutch cruise ship where there was a deadly outbreak of the virus. None of the people being monitored have shown signs of illness, the officials said. The Georgia Department of Public Health is monitoring two residents, it said in a statement. The California Department of Public Health was notified by the C.D.C. that California residents had been on the MV Hondius as well, said Robert Barsanti, a spokesman for the department. The Arizona Department of Health Services received notification that one resident was a passenger on the ship, according to a spokeswoman. (Kirk and Agrawal, 5/6)

About 40 passengers on a cruise ship hit by a deadly hantavirus outbreak previously disembarked on the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena after the first passenger died, Dutch officials said Thursday. The dozens of passengers, including the wife of a Dutch man who died, left the cruise ship during a stop at the British territory, the Dutch foreign ministry said. The Dutch cruise company that operates the ship previously said the Dutch woman disembarked the ship with her husband’s body at St. Helena. She then flew to South Africa on a commercial plane and died after collapsing at an airport in Johannesburg. (5/7)

A Dutch flight attendant is being tested for the hantavirus at a hospital in the Netherlands after she came into contact with someone infected with the virus, the Dutch health ministry said on Thursday, as global health officials scrambled to track people connected to a deadly outbreak of the virus on a cruise ship. (Moses, 5/7)

Infected people aboard the MV Hondius, a Dutch cruise ship with a deadly outbreak of hantavirus, have started to be evacuated from the ship and brought to hospitals in Europe. Two patients have landed in the Netherlands, where they are receiving medical treatment, according to a statement from Oceanwide Expeditions, the Dutch company operating the cruise. Two of the evacuated patients had “acute” symptoms, according to the Dutch foreign ministry. Another patient was evacuated on a separate flight, the company said. That flight is experiencing a delay and the patient is in stable condition, the company said. (Moses, Ortiz and Kirk, 5/6)

Ruhi Çenet, a YouTuber and travel blogger, was on the MV Hondius cruise ship when the captain announced that someone on board had died. “We’re not infectious,” a ship official said in a video Çenet posted on social media. “The ship is safe.” In the days afterward, people on board ate at buffets, mingled, stargazed and attended lectures. Passengers offered comfort and condolences to the widow of the person who had died. Nearly two weeks after the first passenger’s death, Çenet said, he and 20 to 30 other people disembarked in St. Helena, a tiny British territory in the Atlantic Ocean. The widow boarded a flight from the island in a wheelchair, he said. (Martinez, Calfas and Passy, 5/7)

Officials and experts in Argentina are scrambling to determine if their country is the source of a deadly hantavirus outbreak that has gripped an Atlantic cruise. The health emergency aboard the ship that’s moored across the ocean comes as Argentina sees a surge of hantavirus cases that many local public health researchers attribute to the recently accelerating effects of climate change. Argentina, where the cruise to Antarctica departed, is consistently ranked by the World Health Organization as having the highest incidence of the rare, rodent-borne disease in Latin America. (Debre, 5/7)

Three people died aboard a cruise ship in the Atlantic within three weeks this May. Seven cases of hantavirus—two laboratory confirmed, five suspected—have been identified on the MV Hondius, anchored off Cape Verde. Illness struck rapidly. Fever, gastrointestinal symptoms, pneumonia, respiratory distress, shock. One patient in critical condition. Another evacuated from the ship in an ambulance boat. The rare Andes strain of hantavirus, confirmed May 6, is known for something that should terrify public health officials: It can spread from person to person. Yet epidemiologists are not panicking. (Mesa, 5/6)

Tens of millions of taxpayers who were penalized by the IRS during the coronavirus pandemic for failing to pay their taxes or filing late may qualify for a refund or termination of the penalties they incurred during that period. However, the relief is not automatic or guaranteed, and most taxpayers need to file a claim for a refund or abatement of their tax liability by July 10 to get their money back. (Hussein, 5/6)

Doctors and scientists are still working to understand why COVID-19 can cause fatal damage to so many different organs. A potentially major piece of that puzzle was revealed today in research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. During the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitalized patients who weren't sick enough to be in the intensive care unit would suffer heart attacks and strokes, said William T. Bain, MD, a critical care pulmonologist at the University of Pittsburgh and the study's senior author. (Boden, 5/6)

The efficacy of flu shots is not always the same and it’s not always optimal. Some years, they can reduce the risk of illness by as little as 20% to 30%. Messenger RNA technology, or mRNA, is widely seen as a promising way to improve the effectiveness of flu shots, partly because it can be updated more quickly to match circulating strains. (Lovelace Jr., 5/6)

The United States is at high risk of losing its measles elimination status in November as rising case counts and sustained transmission undermine one of the country’s major public health achievements, according to a letter published late last week in The Lancet. Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, meaning there was no continuous transmission for at least 12 months. ... The current resurgence threatens that status. With 2,288 confirmed cases in 2025 and 1,814 confirmed cases as of last week, the country is experiencing its largest measles outbreak in decades. (Bergeson, 5/6)