Waiting and Worrying After Yosemite Hantavirus Outbreak

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Waiting and Worrying After Yosemite Hantavirus Outbreak

By PETER JARET

Bears were the only thing to worry about during our stay at a tent cabin in Yosemite National Park in August, or so my husband and I thought. We scrupulously emptied the car of food and anything a bear might mistake for food, including empty wrappers and scented items like soap. We cleaned every crumb of trail mix from our tent. We stashed everything that might attract a bear in metal lockers provided by the park.

As it turns out, we should have been worrying about a much less obvious threat.

By the time Steven and I returned home, the news reports had begun to appear. An outbreak of hantavirus infection in Curry Village, a popular camping area in Yosemite Valley, had killed two people. Four others had been sickened. But we had camped at Tuolumne Meadows, one of the High Sierra Camps at the far eastern border of the park, miles from Curry Village. We had nothing to worry about.

Then, on Sept. 6, an e-mail arrived: an official notification from Yosemite National Park. “You are receiving this advisory because you have recently stayed in the High Sierra Camps at Yosemite National Park, and we want to inform you — and any members of your party — about a potential public health matter that has been brought to our attention.”

Gulp.

Another case of hantavirus infection had been identified, this one in a camper who had stayed in the High Sierra area where we’d camped. “It is recommended that if a recent visitor to Yosemite National Park exhibits any symptoms,” the e-mail went on, “that they seek medical attention immediately and advise their health care professional of the potential exposure to hantavirus.”

Weirdly, the e-mail featured an inviting panoramic photograph of the Yosemite peaks towering against a clear blue sky.

As a science writer, I knew hantavirus could be swiftly lethal. The virus and the disease it causes, called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome was first discovered in 1993, when a terrifying outbreak began to unfold in the Four Corners area of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona. One of the first cases was a healthy 19-year-old man who was a marathon runner. A day after coming down with flulike symptoms, he went to an emergency room. Three days later he was dead. Medical detectives soon discovered that the man’s fiancée had died days earlier, also from a runaway respiratory infection.

Researchers have since learned that deer mice transmit the virus in their droppings, urine and saliva. People become infected when they inhale particles contaminated with the virus. The first symptoms are varied — fatigue, fever, chills and muscle ache — but the infection can progress within 10 days to coughing, nausea, respiratory difficulty and death.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.