“Human-to-human transmission of hantavirus<\/b> is extremely rare,” clarified the president of the EODY, Thodoros Vassilakopoulos.<\/b><\/p>\n
As he explained, speaking on ERTnews’ Newsroom show,“for this to happen, two people need to be close for a prolonged period of time.”<\/b><\/p>\n
However, he noted that “it has nothing to do with the contagiousness of coronavirus, influenza or even measles.” “We need to understand that we are talking about a ship that has about 150 passengers and so far seven people have had symptoms. Therefore, if it was something so contagious, we would have even more people with symptoms<\/b>,” he said of the cruise ship MV Hondius on which an outbreak of the disease has broken out.<\/p>\n
He added that the European Centre for Disease Control<\/b> has already sent a special scientist to the cruise ship in order to coordinate the tracking process even better.<\/p>\n
Vassilakopoulos stressed that “we are not at risk of a pandemic<\/b>“, adding that “in Greece every year since 2004, when we have been monitoring the disease, we have one or two cases. There was also a year when we had four cases of chantavirus infection<\/b>.”<\/p>\n
As for the Greek passenger on the cruise ship, he commented that “we don’t know yet if he lives in Greece or if he is a Greek living abroad (…) However, the World Health Organization will give us his contact details within the day.”<\/p>\n