A passenger from the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship has said she is being held in quarantine away from her home against her will and despite the recommendations of a medical review by the CDC.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long decried what he has deemed the overreach of public health measures, signed an order Monday requiring that Angela Perryman remain at a Nebraska quarantine unit despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying it was safe for her to return to her home state of Florida under certain monitoring conditions.

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this week refused to release a cruise ship passenger exposed to hantavirus in early May from a quarantine facility in Nebraska, despite a federal medical review that said there’s no need to confine her far from her Florida home.
The order from Kennedy, one of the nation’s most prominent critics of vaccine mandates, lockdowns and other government public health restrictions, spurred outrage from some advocates and legal scholars, who called it illegal and rooted in politics rather than public health.
Five weeks after she left the cruise ship, the passenger, Angela Perryman, is still symptom-free. She remained in quarantine as of Tuesday.
“I want to be able to walk outside and put my feet in the grass,” Perryman said in an interview. “I want to be able to feel fresh air on my face when I want to. I want to be able to see people that are not in full PPE. I don’t want to be dehumanized anymore.”
Courtney Spencer, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the state of Florida chose not to comply with federal requirements for how tightly to monitor Perryman if she returned home. Perryman needs to be quarantined to protect both herself and her community, Spencer said.
Because symptoms of hantavirus have taken as long as 42 days to appear in previous outbreaks, the Americans at the Nebraska facility were to be monitored either there or at home for 42 days — a period set to expire at the end of the day on Sunday, June 21.
Lawrence Gostin, a public health law expert who helped shape current federal quarantine regulations, called the decision to keep Perryman in Nebraska “an egregious violation” of a U.S. citizen’s rights.
“She’s being held, deprived of her liberty,” Gostin said, adding that a broad medical consensus supports allowing her to complete quarantine at home.
Kennedy’s order strays from the CDC official’s recommendation
Kennedy’s order keeping Perryman in Nebraska quarantine came Monday. It followed a medical review earlier this month that was overseen by Dr. Michael Bell of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency within Kennedy’s HHS.
Bell reviewed testimony from CDC officials and an outside medical expert concerning Perryman’s challenge to an earlier order confining her to the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Bell said federal officials insisted that anyone returning home needed daily in-person monitoring and round-the-clock surveillance by local law enforcement or public officials.
Florida officials refused those conditions — which Gostin called “overkill” and a “waste of resources” — and proposed instead that Perryman simply do once-daily temperature checks and symptom assessments.
Experts at the meeting agreed that Florida’s proposal was reasonable. Bell recommended Perryman be allowed to go home, according to a June 11 report obtained by The Associated Press. Kennedy signed the quarantine order anyway.
Perryman says prolonged time in the facility is limiting
Perryman said life in the facility is like being confined in an airport hotel room. Sometimes she can go to its roof for an hour as armed guards watch. Nurses wearing gloves, masks and face shields deliver meals and take her temperature. She said it feels like a “prison.”
The 47-year-old learned that she would be required to stay in the facility until June 21 when Kennedy’s order was slipped under her door on Monday.
“I was appalled,” she said. “I was horrified that the secretary, who is not a physician, would override the doctor and violate the law just to keep me locked up.”
Perryman said she lives primarily in Ecuador but keeps a permanent home with friends in Florida. She said she wants the chance to cook her own food and spend time in more than one room, either in her home or a rental property.
Her quarantine was voluntary, until the order came
Perryman was among 18 Americans aboard the cruise ship who were evacuated to the Nebraska quarantine center on May 11. As of Tuesday, eight of the passengers were still there. The others went home earlier this month, after their states agreed to federal officials’ monitoring plan. They’ll be watched until June 21.
Hantaviruses usually spread when people inhale contaminated residue of rodent droppings. However, the Andes virus at the center of this outbreak, which killed three people, may spread between people in rare cases.
At first, Perryman said, a CDC official assured her the Nebraska quarantine was voluntary. At his urging, and at the urging of the facility’s medical director, she agreed to stay until May 22 to protect public health because some medical experts say most people who develop symptoms do so within the first three weeks. She was later told she couldn’t leave on that date.
Perryman and one other passenger received orders from U.S. health officials requiring them to quarantine at the facility until May 31. Quarantine orders, which can be enforced with fines and prison time, are a rare legal step that can be taken if someone objects to a public health request. The initial orders were signed by the CDC’s acting director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
Perryman said she was told she could leave after May 31 if Florida accepted the federal monitoring requirements. When the state declined, she was ordered to remain in Nebraska.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy questioned universal government-imposed quarantines and argued that the costs of lockdowns should be debated, saying, “quarantines kill people too.”
Gostin said the recent decision clashes with Kennedy’s broader “medical freedom” message.
“This seems to me to drip with hypocrisy,” Gostin said.
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AP video journalist Shelby Lum in New York and AP writer Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

A woman who was exposed to hantavirus on the MV Hondius cruise has been ordered by US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to stay in federal quarantine, despite being cleared to return home to Florida by a federal health expert.
Angela Perryman says that she feels like she is “in prison” and that the health system has used her as “a prop and a political stunt.”
Perryman is one of 18 cruise passengers from the US who were sent to the National Quarantine Unit at Nebraska Medical Center in early May for medical monitoring after being exposed to a rare strain of hantavirus on board the ship.
Some passengers have been willing to stay voluntarily for the entire 42-day quarantine period, but most have left the facility to continue quarantine at home. Passengers who departed were allowed to go if their state health departments agreed to conduct daily symptom monitoring and continuous 24/7 oversight of each person through June 21, and 10 have left.
But Perryman — who initially hoped to leave by June 1 — has not been able to go. Her home state of Florida has not agreed to the federal government’s monitoring requirements.
On Monday, Kennedy signed an order stating that the federal quarantine remains in effect for her.
“At this point, it’s just a state-federal spat, and I’m just a hostage,” Perryman, 47, told CNN.
The initial federal quarantine period for Perryman was set to end May 31, but it was later extended by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through June 21.
Perryman requested a medical review of the extended quarantine order, which was led by Dr. Michael Bell, a quarantine medical reviewer with the CDC. Expert testimony was provided by Dr. Christopher Braden, acting director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Disease, and Dr. David Fitter, director of the agency’s Division of Global Migration Health.
In a report last week, Bell concluded that the federal quarantine order should be rescinded so Perryman could return home for the remainder of the 42-day quarantine period, as long as the Florida Department of Health “agrees to accept responsibility” for her public health monitoring and has a plan in place for hospital care if the need arises.
Instead of the federal government’s requirements for continuous monitoring, Florida proposed once-daily telehealth monitoring. And Bell said this would meet the intent of the quarantine order, which was to ensure that the public is not exposed to someone who may be infectious.
“In my professional judgment, this less restrictive alternative is adequate to protect public health,” Bell wrote.
“The testimony at the medical hearing persuaded me that measures CDC is imposing on Ms. Perryman are not the least restrictive available and that CDC should allow Ms. Perryman to complete her monitoring period at home subject to alternative restrictions.”
On Monday, Kennedy disagreed.
“Having considered the medical reviewer’s findings and recommendation and the evidence in the administrative record, I find that the requirements for Federal quarantine continue to be met,” Kennedy wrote in the order, and “continuation of the order is necessary to protect public health.”
Kennedy’s order did not respond to any of the detail outlined in Bell’s nine-page report.
“Secretary Kennedy specifically considered the medical recommendation before deciding to continue the current order consistent with [Acting CDC Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya],” HHS spokesperson Courtney Spencer said in a statement to CNN. “In the absence of proper home monitoring by state authorities, the Administration’s quarantine order is necessary to ensure both Ms. Perryman’s and her community’s wellbeing.”
Nebraska Medical said that any questions about quarantine orders should go to the CDC, and the Florida Department of Health has not responded to CNN’s request for comment.
Perryman says she has completely lost trust in doctors, public health and the CDC because there have been too many rescinded promises.
“If it had been from the beginning that ‘this is the reason that we need to do this, and there is an actual scientific justification,’ then that would have been OK,” she said. “If there was a scientific reason for this, if I could see that, yes, this actually does further public health, I would have agreed.”
Perryman says Dr. Michael Wadman, medical director of the quarantine unit at Nebraska Medical, promised her that she would be able to return home after a few weeks of voluntary quarantine.
“He appealed to our citizenship, our desire to protect the community, our goodwill, basically,” she said.
Perryman spent $4,000 to rent a house in Florida for a month so she would have a place to stay that was completely private and away from others while she finished the end of the quarantine period, she says.
Nebraska Medicine says the quarantine unit team shared the information that they believed was accurate based on the information they had at the time of the initial quarantine order.
“But the federal agencies still needed to coordinate with the home states, so the logistics of those discussions would need to be confirmed through them,” a media relations coordinator said in an email.
When Wadman came to deliver the news about Kennedy’s order on Monday, Perryman said, she asked him to slip the paper under her door. She didn’t want to talk with him.
“We are not patients. We are just detainees, which is a much lower level of responsibility,” she said.
At the quarantine unit in Nebraska, staff stop by in full personal protective equipment to check their temperatures twice a day and deliver meals, she says. She gets about an hour of outside time each day.
“I can check my temperature in a living room just as easily as I can check my temperature in whatever you call this room,” Perryman said. “It’s like solitary confinement.”

Talk about a gut-brain connection.
Scientists have long known about the link between our stomachs and our brains, warning that our diets and gut health have a large impact on mood and mental health.
And a study published Monday may have found a way to flush the brain fog and attention issues that accompany depression down the toilet.
Cognition issues are common with depression and mental disorders, including trouble with thinking, planning tasks, and both short- and long-term memory.
A team of researchers from the University of Birmingham and the University of Oxford conducted a study looking at the effects of prucalopride, a prescription drug for constipation, on cognitive issues.
Those who took the laxative performed better and faster on cognitive tests to measure focus, attention span, planning, balancing multiple tasks, short- and long-term memory and emotional cognition tasks.
Fifty patients between 18 and 40 with a history of depressive episodes were recruited to take either a two-milligram dose of the laxative — the amount used for chronic constipation — or a placebo for seven to 10 days.
Both before and after taking the drug, participants took a variety of tests that included a working memory task, an auditory verbal learning and memory task and a task on attention and processing speed.
Prucalopride works by gently stimulating bowel movements, but it also activates a serotonin receptor in the gut and brain known as the fourth serotonin receptor, or 5HT4.
These receptors work both to increase gut motility and how fast the bowels empty, and are heavily involved with learning, memory, mood and anxiety.
According to researchers, the medication could help an often overlooked effect of depression.
“For many people, recovery from depression is incomplete because difficulties with memory and concentration persist,” senior author professor Susannah Murphy said in a press release.
“This study provides early evidence that 5HT4 receptor agonists could help restore aspects of cognitive function, opening an exciting new direction for treatment development,” she added.
This study follows previous research from 2024 that also showed 5HT4 receptor agonists used for constipation may also reduce the risk of depression in those with no history of the illness.
Another study found that experiencing depressive symptoms could lead to worsened memory and thinking skills when hitting middle age.
And what we eat can play a role in brain health, especially as we age.

A buzzy diabetes drug that’s been hailed as a longevity booster may have some competition.
The decades-old medication metformin has been touted for everything from treating Type 2 diabetes and reducing the risk of long COVID to potentially slowing the aging process. But a new study published in JAMA found that another intervention did a better job of reducing the risk of developing multiple chronic diseases over two decades of follow-up.
And unlike a prescription medication, it’s available to virtually everyone.
The findings come from an analysis of participants in the landmark Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) and its follow-up study, the Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study DPPOS, which tracked thousands of adults from 1996 through 2021.
The winning strategy? Rigorous exercise and a healthy, balanced diet.
Researchers found that among adults with prediabetes, lifestyle intervention — specifically a low-fat, low-calorie diet and at least 150 minutes of physical activity each week — was associated with a lower burden of multimorbidity over more than two decades of follow-up.
Metformin, meanwhile, performed no better than a placebo.
Multimorbidities refers to having two or more chronic health conditions at the same time. In this study, researchers looked at 15 common conditions in the Medicare claims database, including hypertension, cancer, dementia, Alzheimers disease, chronic kidney disease, heart failure, osteoporosis and stroke.
The original program enrolled 3,234 adults at high risk of developing diabetes. Participants were randomly assigned to intensive lifestyle intervention, metaformin or placebo for three years before entering a long-term follow-up study.
Among 1,173 participants enrolled in Medicare and followed for 21 years, 82% of those in the lifestyle intervention group developed multimorbidity, compared with 85% in the metformin group and 87% in the placebo group.
Researchers say that the study is especially important because efforts to prevent or slow multimorbidity have largely fallen short in real-world medicine. Once patients start accumulating multiple illnesses, it’s been difficult for doctors to meaningfully stop that progression, since the conditions tend to feed into each other over time.
That challenge is even more pressing given the rise of what the study authors referred to as “high-cost condition dyads,” combinations of chronic diseases such as heart failure and kidney disease, or cancer paired with mental health conditions, which make up a disproportionate share of healthcare spending and complexity.
Against that backdrop, the study’s authors turned to metformin and lifestyle intervention because both have already been shown to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes in high-risk patients.
The question was whether either approach could also extend those benefits further and blunt long-term multimorbidity.
Dr. Shirin Jaggi, DO, an endocrinologist at Northwell Health who was not involved in the study, described the findings as “powerful,” as she would be able to “speak with my patients and tell them it’s not just a pill that I need to give you.”
She also emphasized that lifestyle changes are not one-size-fits-all and “could be very different” for everyone, stressing the importance of adopting healthier nutrition and fitness habits gradually over time.
“We have to start slow and work our way up to it,” Dr. Jaggi told The Post, noting the importance of frequent check-ins with patients to see whether goals are being met. “So, for somebody who’s been sedentary, we work slowly, whether that means including 10 to 15 minutes once or just twice a day, and then working our way up.”
As America’s population continues to age, multimorbidity has become increasingly common among adults ages 65 and older. Preventing or delaying its onset is considered one of the biggest challenges in modern healthcare.
“For me to be able to tell patients that there is something they can do beyond prescription, which could be even more powerful than a prescription, I think it’s amazing,” said Dr. Jaggi. “I think it gives patients motivation.”