Evacuation begins of hantavirus ship
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What happened during the evacuation of the hantavirus ship?
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Tegera. Suoja käsineet työhön kuin työhön. Klaas Olsson. Klaas Olsson. You're listening to the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. We're recording this at four hours GMT on Monday the 11th of May. More than half the passengers on the virus-hit cruise ship have been evacuated, with the rest due to follow during the day. President Trump has rejected Iran's latest peace talk proposals as totally unacceptable. And a Palestinian family in the occupied West Bank has been forced by Israeli settlers to dig up a grave. Also in the podcast, we hear from a packed courtroom in Syria where a cousin of the ousted president has gone on trial in the first attempt to bring an Assad-era official to justice.
And... Goodwill. One for one. It doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to cross the line to be a goal. OK. That's it. Well, it certainly wasn't pretty. We visit the city that four football teams have chosen as their base for the World Cup. Rarely has the arrival of passengers from a cruise ship been so closely monitored. But on Sunday, the evacuation of more than 90 people from the MV Hondias was carefully overseen by officials from the Spanish government and the World Health Organisation. The vessel, which had been hit by an outbreak of Hantavirus, is currently anchored off the coast of Tenerife in the Spanish Canary Islands. Passengers were taken off in small boats to a sealed-off area of a local airport, with teams wearing protective bio-suits.
They were then flown back to their own countries or health facilities in the Netherlands. The evacuation of the remaining 60 or so passengers and crew is due to be completed on Monday, before adverse weather could force the ship to leave. The former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Helen Clark, is co-chair of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness. She says many questions remain about the outbreak and initial response, but she praised the latest efforts to contain it. From the 2nd of May, when the virus was confirmed as hantavirus, WHO has acted very speedily and there's been a lot of international cooperation. And that's the really good news part of the story, that the approach through the updated international health regulations appears to be effective.
And that's good news. But we will need to go through every aspect of this at a national and a global level to see what lessons can be learned from how the outbreak spread. beyond that ship. Many of the passengers are expected to go into quarantine, although the United States has said it won't force any Americans to isolate, something the head of the World Health Organization said may have risks. Our correspondent Sarah Rainsford is in Tenerife and from a windy shore described the scene. It's been a day of a pretty major and complex evacuation operation that's been really carefully coordinated by the Spanish authorities, but working with the World Health Organization here. And we've been seeing all day on Sunday small boats ferrying passengers from the
the Hondias cruise liner to shore because the cruiser itself actually anchored out at sea for extra safety reasons. And then all the passengers were gradually being taken to shore in these little boats and then moved to evacuation planes where they were being flown home. So we know that dozens of people have already been taken home. off the the cruise liner but we expect further evacuation flights and more of those boats on monday particularly for some australian nationals because it's taking some time for their plane to reach tenerife in order to evacuate them and what happens to the passengers once they're on those planes are they wearing full hazmat suits that sort of thing Yeah, this whole process has been done with very, very strict security and safety measures in place.
So nobody was allowed off the ferry until an evacuation plane was in place on the tarmac at the airport here, basically with the pilots in place and the engines running.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What happened during the evacuation of the hantavirus ship?
0:00–6:39
2
How did health authorities manage the evacuation process in Tenerife?
6:39–13:06
3
What are the implications of the hantavirus outbreak for passengers?
13:06–19:03
4
What is the significance of the trial against Atif Najib in Syria?
19:03–24:06
5
Why are Palestinian families exhuming graves in the West Bank?
24:06–27:33
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from Global News Podcast
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