On April 1, 114 guests and 61 crew members, unaware of the presence of a killer virus among them, boarded the MV Hondius. That ship has earned the moniker "Ship of Fools." Because of the top brass's reckless disregard of infection control principles, the ship's passengers and thousands of people around the world have been exposed to the rare Andes strain of the hantavirus, a disease found in rat urine and feces, and which has a 40% mortality rate.

Among the passengers who boarded that day was a 70-year-old birdwatcher who had spent his final days ashore traipsing through an Argentinian dump covered with rat feces and looking for rare birds. He was looking for species, not feces, but it's the feces that did him in.

On April 11, he dropped dead on board after five days of illness. No tests were done to figure out why he died, even though his wife was there to alert the ship's staff to his whereabouts before boarding.

Instead, several days later, the ship's command allowed 34 passengers and crew to leave the ship freely at the port of St. Helena and catch planes to destinations across the globe. One of these passengers, the birdwatcher's wife, became so ill while flying she had to be let off in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she was taken to a hospital and died almost immediately.

A Spanish woman on the same flight now has symptoms and is being tested in her home........

© Townhall