CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) 鈥� Venezuela confirmed on Tuesday that three people died of infections of hantavirus, but stressed there was no evidence of in the South American country, which has rarely reported cases of the rodent-borne disease in humans.
The Health Ministry said was also suspected in the deaths of two health workers in the southwestern state of Barinas. Those cases remain under investigation and were not linked to the three fatalities in the eastern state of Anzo谩tegui, about 655 kilometers (407 miles) away.
Both states were spared the worst of the that hit northern Venezuela earlier this month.
The ministry described the deaths in Anzo谩tegui and Barinas as isolated incidents that 鈥渄o not represent a risk to the general community.” But it added that health workers would be sent to the affected states to 鈥済uarantee the health security of all Venezuelans,鈥� without elaborating.
The Venezuelan Medical Federation, a national professional group, said the deaths in Anzo谩tegui were from the same family in the rural municipality of Miranda in the south of the state.
Hantaviruses exist throughout the world and are spread such as rats and mice. It鈥檚 rare and not easy for a hantavirus to spread between people. In severe cases, the virus can cause a deadly lung infection or kidney failure.
As a aboard a cruise ship in the Atlantic showed, some hantaviruses can spread between people in rare cases. The little-studied , detected in the outbreak that killed three passengers and infected several others on the MV Hondius in May, raised concerns around the world due to its mortality rate, as high as 30%, and the current .
Weeks later in Argentina, from where the hantavirus-stricken cruise set sail, authorities are still trying to figure out the origin of the outbreak.
An circulated by officials suggested that patient zero, a Dutch ornithologist, may have become infected in the , famed for its location 鈥渁t the end of the world.” But Argentine scientists for the Andes hantavirus in the area recently ruled out Ushuaia as the source of the outbreak 鈥� to the relief of heavily reliant on foreign tourism.
Argentina also concluded the wine-producing province of Mendoza was not the source of contagion earlier this month, after and biologists from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found no trace of hantavirus in rodents collected from areas visited by the Dutch man and his wife.
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