Doctor vacationing on hantavirus cruise forced to treat patients after ships medic sickened

A doctor traveling as a passenger on the MV Hondius cruise ship has revealed how he stepped in to treat hantavirus patients after the ship’s medic was one of those sickened by the outbreak that has killed at least three people.“I sort of fell into the role of becoming the ship doctor,” Stephen Kornfeld told CNN Thursday of his unexpected work role after the cruise ship’s primary doctor was sickened.“I knew one of the passengers was getting ill.This is at the end of April, and I just reached out if I could assist the doc, make sure he felt he had adequate coverage,” he said of his initial offer of help, before they knew they were dealing with a spreading, deadly virus.“And I was told the doctor was also sick.

So over 12 to 24 hours, it became clear that there were a number of people sick and that they were getting sicker.”Kornfeld, an oncologist in Bend, Oregon, said three people started to get ill around the same time — but didn’t realize their illnesses were hantavirus until last week, weeks after the first death on April 11, which at the time was assumed to be natural causes.“Early on, we didn’t know it was hantavirus until May 2, May 3,” he said.A Dutchman, 70, died on board the ship on April 11 and his wife, 69, died two weeks later after leaving the cruise and trying to fly out of South Africa.Before the widow left, she showed “a lot of confusion, a lot of weakness,” but her symptoms were “non-specific,” Kornfeld said.The unidentified ship’s doctor suffered from a “lot of fever, fatigue, and flushing” before he was removed and taken to intensive care in Johannesburg, according to Kornfeld.“At the time, neither one of them looked critically ill.But the fear with hantavirus is you can go from seriously ill to critically ill very quickly,” he said.Kornfeld, an avid bird watcher, told KTVZ-TV he masked up and worked 18 hours a day with limited resources as he treated sick passengers – when he should’ve been enjoyin...