Twelve workers at Radboudumc university medical centre in Nijmegen are in six-week precautionary quarantine after staff used a standard blood-draw procedure on a hantavirus patient instead of the stricter protocol the virus requires, the hospital announced Monday night.
The hospital also disclosed that staff failed to follow the most recent international regulations when disposing of the patient’s urine, compounding the procedural breach.
The lapse comes as the MV Hondius cruise ship outbreak has already claimed three lives, with at least seven confirmed hantavirus cases and an eighth listed as probable by the World Health Organisation. The hospital’s handling of one of those evacuated patients is now under internal review.
“We regret that this has happened at our university medical center. We will carefully investigate the course of events to learn from this and to prevent it from happening in the future,” said Bertine Lahuis, Chair of the Executive Board of Radboudumc.
The hospital said the risk of infection for the quarantined workers is low, but the six-week monitoring period reflects the seriousness with which officials are treating any potential exposure to a virus for which no vaccine or specific treatment exists.
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