JOHANNESBURG (AP) — When South African infectious disease specialist Lucille Blumberg checked her email on the morning of May 1, while the country was celebrating the Labor Day holiday, an urgent message caught her attention.A U.K.-based colleague had written about a passenger from a cruise ship sailing thousands of miles away in the Atlantic Ocean who had been evacuated and admitted to a Johannesburg hospital with suspected pneumonia. Others aboard the vessel were also sick.The colleague, who monitors diseases in remote British overseas territories in the South Atlantic Ocean, asked Blumberg to follow up on the passenger, who had been evacuated from the ship in one of the territories, Ascension Island.AdvertisementAdvertisementBlumberg and other experts at South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases were suddenly thrown into the race to identify the cause of an outbreak aboard the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius.“Even though it was a public holiday, we moved, we moved really fast,” Blumberg told The Associated Press. “It was busy. There were many conversations. There were online discussions, and there was laboratory testing happening at the time.”Within 24 hours, they had determined that the man’s illness was caused by hantavirus, a rare rodent-borne virus.A process of elimination to identify the diseaseThe elderly British man had arrived at a private hospital in Johannesburg days earlier and was seriously ill, but health workers weren’t sure of the underlying cause.AdvertisementAdvertisementBy the time he was evacuated from the ship, two elderly Dutch passengers who had been on board the MV Hondius cruise liner had already died, but there had been little alarm. Ascension Island health authorities had reported a cluster of illnesses on the ship that appeared to be pneumonia to the World Health Organization.At first, Blumberg and her colleagues thought it might be Legionella, a bacterium that causes a serious form of pneumonia, Legionnaires’ disease. Or maybe bird flu.”I called my infectious disease colleagues, and we had a caucus, and we discussed …
