Argentina's "End of the World" is pushing back on claims that it's the starting point of a deadly virus outbreak. Officials in Ushuaia, the Patagonian port where the cruise ship MV Hondius set sail on April 1, are rejecting the idea that the city—or its windswept landfill popular with bird-watchers—is the source of the hantavirus outbreak now linked to the Dutch-flagged vessel, per the BBC. "We have no record of hantavirus cases in our history," says Juan Facundo Petrina, Tierra del Fuego's director of epidemiology, noting that since the virus became a reportable disease in 1996, the province hasn't logged a single case.
Petrina argues that the region lacks the specific long-tailed mice that typically carry the virus and the right climate for hantavirus development, and points out that Tierra del Fuego is an island separated from the mainland by the Strait of Magellan, limiting rodent migration. He estimates tourists on the ship were likely infected between mid-February and mid-March—weeks before reaching Ushuaia—possibly in other Patagonian provinces further north. National health authorities aren't fully ruling Tierra del Fuego out, dispatching experts to trap and test rodents near the landfill, though that fieldwork has yet to visibly begin.
The stakes are high as tourism is central to Ushuaia's economy; more than 95% of Antarctic cruises depart from its port. Local operators say they've seen a flurry of questions but no cancellations yet, and with the cruise season over and winter tourism ahead, they're eager to project calm. "The absence of cases here is very reassuring," one tells the BBC. On the waterfront, visitors describe a city that feels "quite normal," even as investigators try to trace the path of a Dutch couple believed to be the outbreak's likely starting point. They'd been in Argentina since November, making car trips to Chile and Uruguay, the Guardian reports.
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