GENEVA, July 3 -- For the final contact traced to the cruise ship that became the site of the world's first maritime hantavirus emergency, the news arrived Wednesday: a negative test, a completed quarantine, a return home. Three months after the MV Hondius departed Argentina for one of the planet's most remote island outposts, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak officially over.

Three of the 13 people who contracted the Andes hantavirus during that voyage did not survive.

"Today, the final contact of a person exposed to hantavirus on the cruise ship MV Hondius completed their quarantine period, tested negative and returned home," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday. The declaration closed an ev...