Post #2234815

Interesting detail: https://spectator.com/article/how-dangerous-is-the-cruise-ship-virus-outbreak/ There is a key part of this story that has not yet been told. When the ship docked at Ascension Island, having had one death at sea and disembarked a second case at St Helena (who died on arrival in South Africa), a third person was ill. The doctor on Ascension, Bill Hardy, realised he was seeing a cluster of infections so he called the British Overseas Territories’ on-call infectious disease medic in Britain, Matthew Dryden. By chance Dryden and his colleagues had recently got the Foreign Office to equip all the overseas territories with simple-to-use kits to test for rare diseases. So Dryden suggested testing for Legionella and bird flu. Both came up negative. Dryden then called Professor Lucille Bloomberg at South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases, and she tracked down the third case to a private hospital in Johannesburg. Bloomberg took the samples to the institute and on a hunch tested them for hantavirus: they were positive. She then found samples from the second case, just before they were discarded, and tested them too: also positive. All within 24 hours.