By Matteo Negri and Dominique Vidalon
ROME/PARIS, May 13 (Reuters) - Four people under observation in Italy for possible hantavirus infection have all tested negative, the health ministry said on Wednesday as countries around the globe tried to stop the virus spreading.
The World Health Organization said on Tuesday more cases were expected from the cluster that broke out on a luxury cruise ship during a polar expedition that departed from Argentina, but it stressed this was nothing like Covid and was not a pandemic.
Hantavirus is primarily spread by rodents but can be transmitted between people in rare cases. That requires close contact. Incubation can last around six weeks, and crew, passengers and people in contact with them have been quarantined in several European countries.
Some European health ministers were to meet on Wednesday afternoon to share information and better coordinate their response to the virus, French Health Minister Stephanie Rist told parliament.
TESTING
Three people - a Dutch couple and a German national - have died since the start of the outbreak.
The WHO has increased its tally of confirmed cases in the outbreak to nine, with an additional two suspected cases: one person who died before being tested, and one on Tristan da Cunha, a remote South Atlantic island where there were no tests available. So far, all are considered to have been contaminated on the cruise trip, or before boarding.
In Italy, tests were conducted on an Argentine tourist hospitalised with pneumonia, a man from the southern Italian region of Calabria who was in voluntary isolation, a British tourist located in Milan and a companion travelling with him.
All came back negative, the health ministry said in a statement.
"The risk connected with the virus remains very low in Europe and therefore also in Italy," it added.
The Argentine tourist had left an endemic area in her home country on April 30 and travelled to Italy on a Buenos Aires-Rome flight before later going to Sicily, where she was hospitalised for pneumonia.
The Calabrian man on April 25 had briefly come into contact on a plane with a Dutch woman who later died from the virus.
The British tourist had also come into contact with the Dutch woman on a different flight and was put into quarantine, while his companion was also taken to hospital as a precaution.
In France, health minister Rist said she expected on Wednesday the outcome of tests carried out on the 22 people quarantined for having been in contact with someone with the virus.
Arnaud Fontanet, head of Epidemiology of Emerging Diseases at France's Pasteur Institute, told Reuters on Tuesday that the hunt for new cases could drag on for months, since the incubation time for each case was up to about six weeks. Still, because it does not transmit easily, his guess was that there would be no more than a few dozen more cases in total.
(Reporting by Matteo Negri and Dominique Vidalon, writing by Gavin Jones and Ingrid Melander, editing by Crispian Balmer)
