MV Hondius Outbreak, 13 May Update: First Secondary Case Confirmed in Tenerife

The World Health Organization has updated its situation report on the MV Hondius cluster this morning. The principal addition is the laboratory confirmation of a seventh case of Andes virus disease, in a household contact of one of the passengers disembarked in Tenerife on 10 May. It is the first confirmed case in the outbreak that did not occur on the vessel itself.

The Spanish Ministry of Health has classified the new case as a household secondary transmission. The patient is a partner of a confirmed passenger, was already under voluntary monitoring, and was tested as part of the contact-tracing operation Spanish public-health authorities have been running since the vessel berthed. WHO situation report DON599 has been reissued accordingly, and ECDC has reaffirmed its rapid risk assessment for the general European population at very low.

Date of update

13 May 2026, 08:00 GMT

New case

1 confirmed, secondary (household contact)

Location of secondary case

Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain

Cumulative confirmed cases

7

Suspected cases

3

Reported deaths

3

Jurisdictions in contact tracing

12

Population risk classification

Very low (ECDC, CDC)

What changed today

• One newly confirmed case in a household contact of a returning passenger, identified through routine surveillance rather than acute presentation.
• An additional suspected case in Sweden, a returning passenger, is awaiting confirmatory results at the Swedish Public Health Agency reference laboratory.
• Portugal has joined the international contact-tracing operation after one passenger transited through Lisbon, bringing the number of involved jurisdictions to twelve.
• WHO situation report DON599 has been reissued with revised case definitions for primary, secondary and tertiary transmission.
• ECDC's rapid risk assessment for the general European population remains unchanged at very low. CDC's HAN advisory 00528 remains in force in the United States.

Who is the new secondary case?

Spanish authorities have released only the minimum information consistent with patient confidentiality. The case is an adult resident of Tenerife who shares a household with a confirmed MV Hondius passenger. The contact pair were not separated on disembarkation because the passenger was, at that point, asymptomatic. Symptom onset in the index passenger was 11 May; symptom onset in the household contact was 13 May, an interval consistent with very recent transmission.

The contact is in stable condition at Hospital Universitario Nuestra Señora de Candelaria, the receiving facility for MV Hondius cases since 10 May. Clinicians describe the presentation as prodromal: fever, severe muscle aches and headache, without respiratory symptoms at the time of admission. The patient has been moved to an isolation ward and is being managed under the same protocol applied to the primary passenger cases.

Does this change the risk assessment?

No, and the language used in the WHO and ECDC updates is careful to make that distinction. A secondary case among a known close contact under active monitoring is a foreseen outcome of the outbreak, not an escalation. Both agencies emphasise that the risk to the general European public remains very low and that the case does not indicate community transmission.

The risk picture would change if a confirmed case emerged outside the contact-tracing cohort, for example in a Tenerife resident with no documented link to the ship. As of this morning, no such case has been identified.

Case totals at 13 May 2026

What investigators are watching next

Three operational questions sit at the top of the agenda for the next 72 hours:

1. Whether further secondary cases emerge in the household and intimate-contact cohort. Argentine epidemiology suggests two to three is a plausible upper bound for a cluster of this size; one is on the lower end of the expected range.
2. Whether any case emerges among healthcare workers who handled MV Hondius patients before isolation precautions were instituted on 6 May. Argentine and Chilean outbreaks have produced clusters in this group historically.
3. Whether the Swedish suspected case, currently the only one outside Spain awaiting confirmation, returns positive. A positive result would be the first confirmed case repatriated to a country other than the United States.

Practical takeaways for readers

• If you were a passenger or crew member aboard MV Hondius on or after 1 April 2026, the public-health authority in your country should already have contacted you. If you have not heard from them, contact them.
• Household members of returning passengers should continue daily symptom monitoring for the full 42-day window, which extends, depending on the date of disembarkation, into late June 2026.
• If you live in or recently visited Tenerife, the local public-health risk to you personally is unchanged. The new case occurred inside a known household cluster, not in the wider community.
• If you are a clinician working in any of the twelve involved jurisdictions, hantavirus should now sit on your differential for any patient presenting with febrile illness and severe muscle aches who has plausible MV Hondius exposure history, including household contact with a returning passenger.

Coverage going forward

We update this file as each WHO situation report lands and as primary-source national updates are released. Today's briefing is accompanied by a longer field report on the Tenerife contact-tracing operation and by a separate piece on the regulatory question now in front of the FDA and EMA over compassionate-use access to an experimental post-exposure antibody. Both are published alongside this update.