MADRID (AP) — Spanish authorities on Friday were preparing to receive more than 140 passengers and crew members on board a hantavirus-stricken cruise ship headed for the Canary Islands, where health officials have said they will perform careful evacuations.
The vessel is expected to reach the Spanish island of Tenerife, off the coast of West Africa, on Saturday or Sunday.
“They will arrive at a completely isolated, cordoned-off area,” said Virginia Barcones, Spain's head of emergency services, on Thursday.
Spain is coordinating with governments whose citizens are on board the ship about evacuation plans, Barcones said.
The United States has agreed to send a plane to the Canary Islands to repatriate its 17 citizens from the cruise ship, she said. The British government also said it will charter a plane to evacuate the nearly two dozen British citizens still on the MV Hondius.
At least three passengers have died, and several others are sick. The World Health Organization says the risk to the wider public from the outbreak is low.
Hantavirus is usually spread by the inhalation of contaminated rodent droppings and isn’t easily transmitted between people. Symptoms usually show between one and eight weeks after exposure.
None of the remaining passengers or crew on the ship is currently symptomatic, the Netherlands-based Oceanwide Expeditions cruise ship company said Thursday.
Health authorities across four continents were continuing to track down and monitor passengers who disembarked the ship before the deadly outbreak was detected, and are trying to trace others who may have come into contact with them since then.
On April 24, nearly two weeks after the first passenger had died on board, more than two dozen people from at least 12 different countries left the ship without contact tracing, the ship’s operator and Dutch officials said Thursday.
On Friday, U.K. health authorities said a third British national is suspected to have the hantavirus.
The U.K. Health Security Agency said the suspected case is on Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory in the south Atlantic where the ship stopped in April.
There was no word on their condition.
Two other Britons who were on the ship have been confirmed to have the virus. One is hospitalized in the Netherlands and the other in South Africa.
Authorities in South Africa are also trying to trace contacts of any passengers who previously got off the ship. They have focused mainly on an April 25 flight from St. Helena to Johannesburg, the day after passengers disembarked there.
Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
Health workers in protective gear arrive to evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
The MV Hondius cruise ship departs the port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
LONDON (AP) — The BBC is hosting a party for David Attenborough at the Royal Albert Hall. Cinemas are playing his nature films. Friends have spent weeks lavishing praise on the man and his work.
But the world’s most famous wildlife presenter is likely to be uncomfortable with all the attention as he celebrates his 100th birthday on Friday, said Alastair Fothergill, the producer of some of Attenborough’s most well-known documentaries.
“He’s always been very clear to all of us that work with him: ‘Remember, the animals are the stars, I’m not,’’’ Fothergill told The Associated Press. “So, yes, surprisingly for one of the most famous men on the planet, he doesn’t like being famous at all.”
But Attenborough has had to accept the accolades this week as scientists, politicians and conservationists celebrated the man who has brought frolicking gorillas, breaching whales and tiny poisonous frogs into living rooms around the world for more than 70 years.
Through BBC programs such as Life on Earth, The Private Life of Plants and The Blue Planet, Attenborough has illuminated the beauty, ferocity and sometimes downright weirdness of nature in a hushed melodic voice that conveys his own awe at what he is witnessing.
Viewers who might never leave their hometowns were transported to the Himalayas, the Amazon and the unexplored forests of Papua New Guinea. But behind the stunning images was an attention to scientific accuracy that helped teach people about complex subjects like evolution, animal behavior and biodiversity.
And as the evidence mounted, he began to sound the alarm about climate change, ocean plastic and other human-caused threats to the planet.
That helped people understand not only how life evolved but, more importantly, why we have to protect it, said Professor Ben Garrod, an evolutionary biologist at the University of East Anglia and himself a broadcaster who has worked alongside Attenborough.
Attenborough, Garrod believes, initially saw himself as a neutral observer but was compelled to speak out when he saw that politicians, business leaders and the public weren’t taking the emergency seriously.
“He is showing you the majesty, the ferocity, the fragility of the natural world. He shouldn’t have ever had to have turned to policymaking and advocacy,” Garrod said.
“I think it’s very easy for a lot of people to say, ‘He should have done it sooner. Why didn’t he act 20 years, 30 years, 40 years ago?’” Garrod then asked: “Why didn’t we?''
Born in London on May 8, 1926, the same year as the late Queen Elizabeth II, Attenborough was raised on the grounds of what is now the University of Leicester, where his father was a senior leader.
His fascination with nature developed when he was a young boy, riding his bicycle into the surrounding countryside where he collected treasures such as abandoned birds’ nests, the shed skin of a snake and, most importantly, fossils.
“I’d find a fossil and show it to my father and he’d say ‘Good, good, tell me all about it.’ So I responded and became my own expert,” Attenborough told Smithsonian Magazine in 1981.
He went on to study geology and zoology at the University of Cambridge.
In 1952, Attenborough joined the BBC, working behind the scenes on “everything from ballet to short stories.” After he'd been there about two months, the capture of a “living fossil” off the coast of East Africa caused an international stir, and he was asked to produce a short piece about the coelacanth.
That story was told in the studio by Professor Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist, who used pickled wildlife specimens and a photograph of a coelacanth to explain the fish’s significance.
But Attenborough thought television could do more.
“I’d always wanted to do films on animals around the world,” he recalled in a 1985 interview with The Associated Press. “But the attitude was, ‘We’ve got TV cameras in the studio. What’s this about spending money abroad?’”
In 1954, he finally persuaded the BBC to let him accompany a London Zoo team that traveled to West Africa to collect specimens. That began a decade as host and producer of “Zoo Quest,” kick-starting his career in the field.
One of the most famous moments of that long career came during the 1979 series “Life on Earth,” when Attenborough encountered a family of mountain gorillas in a forest on the border of Rwanda and what was then Zaire (now Congo).
During that scene, voted one of Britain's top TV moments of all time, a young gorilla lies across his body while several babies try to remove his shoes. Attenborough grins, laughs and is speechless with delight.
“I honestly don’t know how long it was,’’ Attenborough later told the BBC. “I suspect it was about 10 minutes, or even a quarter of an hour. I was simply transported.”
“Extraordinary, really,’’ he reflected. “It was one of the most privileged moments of my life.”
Attenborough has combined his knowledge of television, an understanding of his audience and his commitment to science to create a character who could deliver complicated issues surrounding wildlife, conservation and natural history to a mass audience, said Jean-Baptiste Gouyon, a professor of science communication at University College London.
“Basically he gave wildlife television a figure, a front of the house person … which has come to embody television discourse about nature,” Gouyon said.
And on this, his centenary, his fans made a point of finding him. In a recorded audio message he said he thought he would mark the day quietly. As if.
“I’ve been completely overwhelmed by birthday greetings from preschool groups to care home residents and countless individuals and families of all ages,'' he said. “I simply can’t reply to each of you all separately, but I would like to thank you all most sincerely for your kind messages.”
And he isn’t planning to stop now, Fothergill said.
“He said to me recently he feels unbelievably privileged that a man in his late 90s is still being asked to work. And, you know, he will go on forever. He will die in his safari shorts.”
Hilary Fox contributed.
FILE - Head of creative enterprise, Maddie Hall, watches hundreds of television screens with broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough's face, from when he was a young broadcaster, projected on a 360 degree screen inside the dome within the Market Hall ahead of a public release of an immersive film to mark his 100th birthday on May 8, at Real Ideas in Devonport, Plymouth, England, May 6, 2026. (Ben Birchall/PA via AP, File)
FILE - David Attenborough holds 'Inti', an armadillo from Edinburgh Zoo, before receiving a cheque from the People's Postcode Lottery for the charity Fauna and Flora International of which he is Vice-President, at Prestonfield House, Edinburgh, Jan. 24, 2017. (Jane Barlow/PA via AP, File)
FILE - Three year old Susan and her father David Attenborough pose for a photo with a sulphur-crested cockatoo Georgie, Dec. 7, 1957. (PA via AP)
FILE - David Attenborough, watched by zoo staff, reaches out to a kangaroo during his visit to Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, Oct. 14, 2003. (AP Photo/Dan Peled, File)
FILE - Butterfly Conservation President Sir David Attenborough poses for a photo with a south east Asian Great Mormon Butterfly on his nose, as he launches the Big Butterfly count at London Zoo, July 11, 2012. (John Stillwell/PA via AP, File)
