A specialist team of army and medical paratroopers took a death-defying 8,000ft jump to deliver medical supplies to a man suffering from suspected hantavirus on the remote British overseas territory Tristan da Cunha.
Medics were flown 7,000 miles from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire to the world’s most remote inhabited island in the South Atlantic ocean, arriving just days before the British national would have ran out of oxygen.
In a first operation of its kind, six paratroopers, an RAF consultant and army nurse from 16 Air Assault Brigade parachuted onto the island at 7pm on Saturday to offer assistance to the two exhausted medics on the island.
Tristan da Cunha, which called for urgent help a few days earlier, has no airstrip and is normally only accessible by boat, and at only seven miles across is a hard jump even for the experts.
“It’s a real fight for the parachutist,” Brigadier Ed Cartwright, who was in charge of the operation told The Times. The jump needs to be timed perfectly, he explained. “If you miss the island you’re in the drink, and that’s emotional.”
The MoD said it was the first time medical personnel had been parachuted in to provide humanitarian support.
The patient was on board the cruise ship MV Hondius, where an outbreak of the virus has killed three people, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has confirmed. They are currently in hospital on the island where they live, the UK minister for the overseas territories, Stephen Doughty, said in a statement.
Foreign secretary Yvette Cooper said the safety of “all members of the British family” is the top priority.
She said: “We will continue to work closely with international authorities and the Tristan da Cunha administration, keeping those affected informed and ensuring the right support is in place in the UK and across the Overseas Territories.”
The MV Hondius arrived in Tenerife on Sunday morning, and British passengers have been repatriated to isolate at Arrowe Park Hospital on the Wirral, Merseyside, which was used as the UK’s initial Covid quarantine site, as the UKHSA said the risk to the public “remains very low”.
Officials from the UKHSA and Foreign Office greeted the MV Hondius when it docked in Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, and Britons on board were tested for hantavirus before they disembarked.
Those who tested negative with no symptoms were taken straight to a chartered repatriation flight staffed by medical professionals.
The passengers are now being housed in an accommodation block on the Arrowe Park site away from the hospital’s public areas to receive clinical assessments and testing as a precautionary measure.
The site was used to house British citizens returning from Wuhan, China, in January 2020 at the start of the Covid pandemic.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Saturday there were no symptomatic passengers on board the ship.
The UN health agency said there had been six confirmed hantavirus cases linked to MV Hondius, and four patients were currently in hospital.
It added that a total of eight cases, including three deaths, had been reported, with one previous suspected case being reclassified after testing negative for hantavirus.
The UKHSA said three British nationals are included in the eight cases – two involve confirmed hantavirus and another one is suspected.
The two confirmed British cases are in hospital in South Africa and the Netherlands, while the third British national in Tristan da Cunha was being supported by health services on the remote South Atlantic island.
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