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American Hondius Passengers to Head to Nebraska Quarantine Center

Global public-health officials race to contain the spread of hantavirus as over 100 passengers are set to return to home countries

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is sending staff to the Canary Islands to meet a cruise ship with a hantavirus outbreak.

The MV Hondius has a hantavirus outbreak that has killed three people and infected five others; the rare Andes variant is confirmed.

Seventeen American passengers from the ship will be quarantined at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s National Quarantine Unit.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent staff to the Canary Islands to meet the cruise ship at the center of a hantavirus outbreak that global health authorities are racing to contain.

There, they are expected to help facilitate the next leg of the journey for 17 American passengers on board the vessel.

That destination: high-tech quarantine facilities in Omaha, Neb., that include a unit used in 2014 to monitor U.S. citizens with Ebola and again in 2020 for Americans returning from Wuhan, China, and from the Diamond Princess cruise ship stricken with Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic.

Public-health officials in states including Virginia, Texas and Georgia are now monitoring other Americans who got off the ship before authorities confirmed the outbreak. States like New Jersey are watching people who shared flights with cruise passengers who later were diagnosed with the virus.

As of Saturday, none of the passengers currently aboard the MV Hondius were showing signs of hantavirus, the rare infection carried by rodents that has so far killed three people and infected five others aboard the Hondius. But the contagion risk is still a mystery. There are confirmed cases among those who already left the boat and questions swirling over possible exposures on flights, pressuring U.S. health officials to escalate their strategy to halt its spread.

The Hondius is expected to dock early Sunday local time at Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands in Spain, according to the ship’s operator, Oceanwide Expeditions. The State Department is organizing a repatriation flight to bring the Americans still on board the ship back to the U.S. Another CDC team will go to a Nebraska Air Force base to meet the flight on its return.

The American cruise ship passengers will be brought to the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s National Quarantine Unit, the center said. The 20-room facility is the only quarantine facility funded by the federal government in the U.S., and its rooms are equipped with personal bathrooms, exercise equipment, Wi-Fi and special ventilation systems, according to the center. It was funded by a nearly $20 million federal grant.

The facility looks more like a hotel than a hospital. People quarantining at the center are asked not to leave their rooms and receive, essentially, room service brought to their door, said Dr. Michael Wadman, medical director of the National Quarantine Unit at University of Nebraska Medicine.

“We’re familiar with this virus,” Wadman said, contrasting it to Covid, which was a novel virus when it first emerged. “But in this situation we want to err on the side of caution.”

Nurses and physicians trained in infection control instruct those staying in the units on protocols, including how to manage their laundry, Wadman said. Nurses wearing personal protective equipment will check their symptoms daily. The quarantine unit staff also ensure people staying there can speak to friends and family and have access to counseling services if needed.

Staff undergo quarterly training that allows them to activate the quarantine unit quickly and mitigate a variety of situations, Wadman said. That could include determining what to do if someone vomits in their room or facilitating care if a healthcare provider gets sick.

“We’re really training to the range of possibilities,” Wadman said.

If any cruise ship passengers are quarantined and develop symptoms, they will be moved to the nearby Nebraska Biocontainment Unit—a facility isolated from the rest of Nebraska’s medical center, designed to treat patients infected with highly hazardous infectious diseases, according to Nebraska Medicine.

A CDC official said Saturday that ship passengers will be monitored for around six weeks, or 42 days, but not necessarily only in Nebraska. The official said authorities will coordinate with some passengers and local jurisdictions for at-home monitoring, though it wasn’t clear how many people were going home or when.

Scientists confirmed that the rare Andes variant of hantavirus is the source of the outbreak on the ship. It is the only form of the disease carried by rodents that can be transmitted between humans. Normally people can only transmit it through very close contact, like sharing food or living quarters, according to experts.

The World Health Organization said two passengers who later died from hantavirus boarded the vessel after traveling through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay on a bird-watching trip that included visits to areas where rats known to carry the Andes variant live.

Quarantines for returning travelers, depending on their level of exposure, could end up being lengthy as the incubation period for the virus is around six weeks. Argentina, which deals with this strain of hantavirus more than most countries, sets guidelines based on a person’s exposure. U.S. public health officials might take guidelines from Argentina into account when determining how to handle the ship’s passengers or any others who might have been exposed, said Dr. Gaby Frank, director for the Center for Special Pathogens at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

“The monitoring can be a little more intense or less intense,” she said. If a person was at high risk of exposure, she said, that person would likely be asked to have no contact with anyone else until the roughly six-week incubation period has passed.

That said, a person with a lower-risk exposure might only need to check in with public-health officials by phone once a day. In Texas, for example, the state’s health department said two residents who were aboard the ship are now checking their temperatures daily and agreed to contact public-health officials if they start to show any symptoms.

Passengers with symptoms could be sent to isolation on the island, health officials warn

The cruise ship hit by the rat-borne hantavirus is due to arrive early on Sunday in the Canary Islands, where infectious disease doctors and emergency aircraft are massing to evacuate almost 150 people on board.

The Spanish government said the MV Hondius would arrive between 4am and 6am local time as multiple national governments prepare repatriation flights and quarantine procedures for their citizens, while racing to track others who left the ship at stops in the Atlantic.

The evacuation in Tenerife marks the most critical step yet in the brewing hantavirus crisis, which has killed three people. It has drawn comparisons with the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, but health officials stress the risk to the general public from illness is low because the virus requires close contact to spread.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, was travelling to Tenerife on Saturday to help oversee the arrival of 147 people, which is being led by the Spanish government.

Mónica García, Spain’s health minister, said: “This is an unprecedented operation on an international scale.”

The hantavirus outbreak now comprises six confirmed cases and two probable cases, including the three cruise passengers who have died.

The response has been complicated by the disease’s incubation time of up to eight weeks and a cruise itinerary that involved multiple stops on remote Atlantic islands with limited medical facilities.

After infectious disease specialists have boarded the ship in Tenerife to assess the 87 passengers and 60 crew, most will disembark in small groups by nationality, starting with 14 Spaniards.

Provided they are symptom-free, the Spaniards will be flown on a military jet to Madrid where they will go into hospital quarantine for several weeks.

here are more than 20 British citizens on the Hondius. They will be met by UK officials in Tenerife and escorted to a flight home. UK health authorities said on Saturday that they would be taken to a hospital in north-west England for an initial isolation period of up to 72 hours, after which they will be asked to isolate at home for 45 days.

US nationals on the ship will be evacuated to an air force base in Nebraska, then transported to a nearby national quarantine centre in Omaha, said the US Centers for Disease Control.

Fernando Grande-Marlaska, Spain’s interior minister, said: “Only when the aircraft bound for a specific country is on the runway, ready to depart for that country, will that country’s nationals be disembarked and taken ashore in small boats.”

Passengers with symptoms could be sent into isolation in a Tenerife hospital, but final decisions on how they would be handled have not been made, said a health ministry official.

Unease over the evacuation has grown in Tenerife, with one union of port workers threatening to blockade the facility.

In a letter to the island’s people on Saturday, Tedros acknowledged the anxiety, but wrote: “I need you to hear me loud and clear: this is not another Covid outbreak. The current public health risk posed by hantavirus remains low. My colleagues and I have stated this unequivocally, and I repeat it now.”

The outbreak is caused by the Andes hantavirus, which is carried by rodents and often spread via their excreta. It is thought to have been brought on to the Hondius by a Dutch couple who had been on a birdwatching trip to Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. The husband died on the ship and his wife died in Johannesburg after leaving the vessel in St Helena.

The disease’s fatality ratio can reach 50 per cent and it is particularly dangerous to older people, the WHO warned. The average age of passengers on the Hondius is 65, it added.

Of the five confirmed or suspected hantavirus cases who are still alive, four are in hospital — two in the Netherlands and one each in South Africa and Switzerland. The fifth person is on the island of Tristan da Cunha, a British overseas territory.

Two people who spent time on a plane with the Dutch woman who died have been hospitalised in Spain as a precaution. Another person from the same plane is being monitored in South Africa and Italy’s health ministry said on Saturday it was keeping a further four people under surveillance.

German company backed by Spotify’s Daniel Ek set to raise $1.2bn in latest funding round

Helsing, the German defence technology group backed by tech billionaire Daniel Ek, is set to raise new funding at a valuation of about $18bn, cementing its status as one of Europe’s most valuable start-ups.

The $1.2bn fundraising is being led by US firm Dragoneer Investment Group, with existing backer Lightspeed Venture Partners acting as co-lead, according to people familiar with the matter. The plans are at an advanced stage but the timing has not yet been finalised, they added.

Helsing’s funding round is the latest indication of investors’ enthusiasm for the defence sector. Private investment has surged on the promise of higher military spending by Europe’s governments following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The conflict and the proliferation of drones have also spurred changes in battlefield technology.

The valuation marks a substantial increase from less than a year ago, when Helsing raised €600mn in a deal led by Spotify founder Ek’s investment company Prima Materia at a €12bn ($14bn) valuation.

The money pouring into drone developers has prompted some established defence industry players, such as Rheinmetall chief executive Armin Papperger, to warn of a “bubble” in the sector.

But others say that European governments continue to invest too much in “legacy” technology such as conventional tanks and fighter jets, arguing that there should be more investment in unmanned systems and other innovative technologies.

The latest Helsing fundraising was oversubscribed multiple times, said the people familiar with the matter, highlighting investor interest in a new generation of defence start-ups focused on integrating AI into weapons systems.

Europe boasts several defence tech unicorns — start-ups valued at more than $1bn — including drone makers Quantum Systems and Tekever.

Helsing’s competitors include US-based Anduril Industries, founded by billionaire war drone maker Palmer Luckey, which has held talks with investors about a new funding round at a valuation of more than $60bn. In Europe, it vies with companies such as Quantum Systems and Stark, which is backed by US tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

Founded in 2021, Munich-based Helsing originally focused on producing AI software to analyse battlefield data and improve military decision-making.

It has expanded into producing its own kamikaze drones — single-use machines designed to fly into a target and blow it up — and autonomous underwater vessels.

It has also struck partnership deals with some of Europe’s established defence contractors including Sweden’s Saab. It is also working on an unmanned aircraft designed to fly alongside crewed fighter jets.

Helsing has at times faced questions about its products. Its first kamikaze drone, a model called the HF-1 made in collaboration with a Ukrainian partner, drew criticism in Ukraine over its performance and price.

Its successor model, the HX-2, has been approved for frontline use by Ukraine’s military, according to Helsing, which said it had been successfully hitting Russian targets.

The company was recently praised for its work in Ukraine by Oleksandr Kamyshin, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on strategic industries, including defence.

Helsing has also been selected to supply drones to the German armed forces in a deal worth an initial €269mn, with an option of providing more HX-2 drones with a total value of up to €1.46bn in the future.

While Helsing’s new funding round is led by US investment firms, the group remains nearly 80 per cent owned by Europeans, one of the people familiar with the fundraising process said.

The group has previously been backed by investors including Accel, Plural, General Catalyst, Greenoaks, Saab, and BDT & MSD Partners.

Helsing declined to comment. Dragoneer and Lightspeed did not respond to requests for comment.

Mexican assets, including the iShares MSCI Mexico exchange-traded fund and the peso, have been buoyant under President Sheinbaum.

The U.S. indictment of Sinaloa State Gov. Ruben Rocha Moya for drug trafficking complicates Sheinbaum’s job.

This indictment comes two months before the July 1 USMCA review, which underpins 30% of Mexico’s GDP.

President Claudia Sheinbaum has kept Mexican assets buoyant by cooperating with her neighbor President Donald Trump while staying popular at home. The iShares MSCI Mexico exchange-traded fund has climbed 14% this year, outpacing the S&P 500’s 6%. The peso has gained 4.5% against the dollar.

The U.S. administration just complicated Sheinbaum’s job at the worst possible time. On April 29, federal prosecutors indicted Sinaloa State Gov. Ruben Rocha Moya and nine associates for allegedly helping their notorious local drug cartel “import massive quantities of narcotics into the United States.”

That comes two months before the July 1 deadline to “review” the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on free trade, which underpins 30% of Mexico’s gross domestic product—and as the economy shrank 0.8% in the first quarter of 2026.

“Mexico will be trying to bifurcate the issues of trade and drug trafficking,” says Henry Ziemer, an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Americas Program. “The U.S. wants to bundle them together.”

Merits of the case aside, Rocha Moya, 76, is a senior figure in Sheinbaum’s Morena Party and close ally of her predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. If she extradited him to face Yankee justice, more targets would likely follow.

The Rocha Moya indictment is “just the beginning,” the Republican majority on the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee promised in a statement. “Sheinbaum has reached an impossible situation,” says Duncan Wood, CEO of Hurst International Consulting.

So far, Sheinbaum is “playing for time and hoping Washington gets distracted by other issues,” Ziemer says. The Mexican president has called for “irrefutable evidence” of a crime. Rocha Moya has stepped down from his post temporarily.

Time isn’t on Mexico’s side with the USMCA, though. Review talks look certain to blow through their July 1 deadline and may stalemate after that. Sheinbaum’s negotiators look ready to give ground on technical issues like increasing U.S. content thresholds for North American cars or restraining Chinese “back door” investment in Mexico.

Washington may nevertheless use narcotics flows as a pretext for leaving the trade pact in “zombie” status—still in force but requiring renewed scrutiny every year, says Thierry Larose, portfolio manager for emerging markets local debt at Vontobel Asset Management. “The Trump administration likes to maintain levels of fear and unpredictability,” he says.

The zombie USMCA specter means “risks are to the downside on macro and probably company results,” says Alejandro Fuchs, Mexico strategist for Itaú BBA. This year’s equity rally has brought average price/earnings ratios close to their historic average of 13, he notes.

Mexican fixed income looks more enticing. The peso “is showing remarkable resilience,” not least as a liquid alternative to a weakening dollar, says Gabriela Soni, head of Mexico investment strategy at UBS Global Wealth Management.

UBS sees the currency holding steady around 17.2 to the dollar by the end of this year. On that basis, 10-year bond yields north of 9% look favorable, Larose says.

Mexico comes to the USMCA table with some cards. It has become the U.S.’s top trading partner, with two-way commerce rising 4% last year to $873 billion. (The European Union is bigger as a single entity.) And industry North of the border strongly supports the pact. “Not renewing it would trigger a big uproar from the private sector,” Ziemer says.

Still, the Rocha Moya indictment increases potential volatility in assets priced for stability. Watch out.

The giant industrial companies of the past were eventually broken up—but it wasn’t easy. The next target: the tech giants.

Before Standard Oil became “the most gigantic, the most cruel, impudent, pitiless, and grasping monopoly which ever fastened upon a community,” it was a start-up.

John D. Rockefeller was 24 in 1863 when he invested in the emerging new technology of distilling crude into kerosene. Some believed this clean-burning fuel might one day replace whale oil as America’s chief indoor lighting source.

Rockefeller didn’t quit his day job, in the produce business, since the oil scheme remained mostly aspirational. And he still had to find something to do with the waste product that resulted from the kerosene-making process: gasoline.

We know how the story turns out. Like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and other entrepreneur-moguls who followed, Rockefeller leveraged his early success in a new high-tech industry into market dominance. Standard Oil at its peak controlled 90% of the U.S. crude market.

Rockefeller succeeded through vision, hard work, and ruthless tactics—and in the end, his creation was broken up by regulators. That same fate befell American Tobacco and AT&T, among others, and has threatened the practices of Microsoft, Meta Platforms’ Facebook, Alphabet’s Google, and fellow modern titans.

In America, there’s a sense that too much success in business is a bad thing, and that everyone needs to play fair. That is the concept behind U.S. antitrust laws developed beginning in the late 19th century to rein in monopolies like Standard Oil.

“[I]t should be as much the policy of the laws to multiply the numbers engaged in independent pursuits, or in the profit or production, as to cheapen the price to consumers,” wrote the Ohio Supreme Court in 1892, the first time Standard Oil was broken up.

Rockefeller got around that ruling. But Standard Oil finally went under the knife in 1911, split into 34 separate companies that sometimes seem like they are bent on reunifying.

While Rockefeller was the most spectacularly successful at monopoly building—what he gently termed “cooperation”—he was also part of a greater movement in American business toward rationalization and centralization. That is, putting all facets of an operation under the command and control of one central administrator.

Rockefeller and contemporaries like financier J.P. Morgan and steel magnate Andrew Mellon were known as “robber barons.” Their counterparts today go by terms like techno-oligarchs. They face the same antitrust concerns.

Founding Fathers including Washington and Hamilton encouraged “manufactures,” though businesses in the early Republic were necessarily small and locally oriented.

The possibility for national markets was brought about by the railroad, which by the 1870s had connected all major U.S. cities and many minor ones, and the telegraph that ran beside it.

Industry spread, too. But markets tended to remain local, with varying prices and quality of goods from one place to the next.

The salt barons of Michigan decided to do something about that. The state’s natural salt “licks” had long been harvested by Native Americans, and by 1888 Michigan produced 40% of U.S.-manufactured salt.

The operation was tightly controlled by the Michigan Salt Association, a “pool” comprising most state producers. The association insured quality, directed distribution, and set prices—which, because of its market power, were followed across the nation. For many Americans, this was an improvement.

“The salt association was thus a classic example of an effort by producers to rationalize the methods of production, and, more important, marketing,” Page Smith writes in The Rise of Industrial America.

It also formed a functional monopoly, sparking concerns of excessive profit-taking.

“Equally important, the practice violated the venerable principle of free competition,” Smith writes, and the association dissolved amid antitrust challenges by 1890.

In 1882, Rockefeller created the Standard Oil Trust. Nine trustees ran dozens of companies as one, controlling the market from exploration to retail, and paying out handsome dividends.

“The combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return,” Rockefeller later declared.

In Rockefeller’s defense, as a business owner, you would rather have a job done by your own trusted people than pay an unknown third party to handle the task. Rockefeller just took it to extremes, so that all the workers were his people.

In 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court found Standard Oil guilty of practices deemed “unreasonable” in restraining trade, separating 33 operating units from their parent, unleashing a world of “oil majors” like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. The “rule of reason” now guides all antitrust decisions.

AT&T narrowly avoided a breakup a couple of years later, mostly because it had the nation’s only working long-distance telephone network. The government granted AT&T the status of a regulated monopoly, and it became one of the largest and most successful companies in U.S. history.

Still, its control of the industry—and Americans’ daily lives—earned AT&T the epithet “Ma Bell.” And in its high and mighty position, it became an object of ridicule.

“We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company,” Lily Tomlin cackled, catching the national mood as Ernestine the Telephone Operator on the TV show Laugh-In (1968-73).

It took another decade, but the Bell system was broken up into the Baby Bells, ushering in a new world of phones not attached to the kitchen wall.

Both Microsoft (2001) and Google (2025) have had to adjust business practices after violating antitrust laws. Amazon.com and Apple have cases pending, while the government is appealing a favorable decision for Meta.

Antitrust cases aren’t likely to end anytime soon, as modern-day barons try to toe the line in the antitrust “rule of reason.” And regulators can be expected to take the same attitude toward suspected monopolies as the Ohio Supreme Court did in the 1892 Standard Oil ruling.

“Experience shows that it is not wise to trust human cupidity where it has the opportunity to aggrandize itself at the expense of others,” they wrote.