Montana: California: In most cases, the carriers of the virus turned out to be deer mice. Which is a challenge. The deer mouse, Peromyscus maniculatus, prefers rural fields, forests, and outbuildings; it has nothing to do with deer, despite its name. They grow like a crop during spring and summer, and with a certain percentage of them grows the hanta.
Visitor one was lucky. Her body fought off the virus, and she recovered. Tests eventually confirmed that it was, as Charles Mosher suspected, hantavirus. At that point—mid-July—there was no cause for alarm at the park. Aside from the original outbreak, medical experts believed hantavirus almost never occurred in clusters. Though she visited Yosemite, Visitor One could have caught it anywhere on her visit to the eastern Sierra.
Then Visitor Two came down with the flu. The year-old Alameda County man checked himself into the hospital on July On July 31, he was dead. A quick check of lodging records revealed that Visitor One and Visitor Two had one commonality: both stayed in the signature tent cabins, the new s.
Alarm bells rang. Buttke met a state public-health team, including Mariposa County public-health officer Charles Mosher, in Curry Village. Their weapon of choice: pencils. During their inspections, the team discovered something interesting.
Suddenly, the picture became clearer. He spent part of his summer analyzing the Yosemite hantavirus strain. It turned out to be very similar but not identical to the Sin Nombre strain. In Curry Village, deer mice might have occasionally scurried across the floor of the older soft-sided tents.
But in the hard-sided s they lived in the walls, continually shedding virus. Guests store food in outdoor bear-proof boxes instead.
But the new s had different rules. Mouse populations are extremely dynamic. Conception to birth: 21 days. They can reproduce six weeks after birth. Given a safe nesting ground and a bountiful food supply, a mouse population can explode.
When a hanta-infected male starts fighting for territory, he bites and scratches his competitors, which spreads the virus mouse to mouse. Leave the nest to fight, and you risk getting eaten. In predator-free Curry Village, not so much. In early August, the park shut down the 91 signature tent cabins. Cleaning crews gave every cabin a sanitizing deep clean. Maintenance workers sealed gaps and tightened up the vinyl-coated canvas draped over the double-plywood walls.
They hammered fresh one-by-fours around the base of each of the new s. No way any mouse was squeezing through that. When CDPH officials inspected and cleared the fortified cabins, the park reopened the series to visitors. On August 12, Visitor Three died. The news exploded. If they felt themselves coming down with the flu, the Park Service advised them to get tested for hantavirus. A handful of early-summer guests turned up positive.
During that window, visitors were checked into signature tent cabins without being informed about the outbreak. They stayed three nights in cabins and Sweeping can send the virus into the air and potentially into the lungs. The belief was that the extra precautions taken to rid the cabins of mice, along with redoubled cleaning efforts, had reduced the risk of infection to near-zero.
And, in fact, nobody who stayed in the new s after the end of July contracted the virus. Eventually, though the mice found their way back in. The inspectors that Al Oligino noticed continued to check the cabins for rodent signs. In late August, they found them. Check and mate. On August 28, Yosemite officials permanently closed all 91 signature tent cabins. On December 10, park maintenance crews began removing the entire double-wall series.
A load equal to about dump trucks thundered down and crushed an unoccupied cabin. The new s went up, away from the falling rock. Nobody, it was thought, should die because they were assigned an unlucky cabin. Looking back on it, the Yosemite hantavirus outbreak appears to be a case study in modern virus hunting and the psychology of disease.
What gave the story legs was its combination of the well-known and the unknown: iconic brand name meets mysterious peril. The effects of the story were something to see.
I visited Yosemite in mid-September, and I can tell you I had to tamp down my own anxiety to do so. I considered bringing my kids along to see El Capitan but ultimately decided against it. No sense possibly exposing them. On the way to Yosemite, I stopped at Home Depot and bought a respirator mask. Just in case. When I arrived at Curry Village on a sunny autumn day, I counted only a handful of lodgers. At the bike rental stand, I tested a fat-tire cruiser and asked the counter guy if business had slowed.
He glanced at a barn full of unrented two-wheelers. I wandered around for a while, maskless. The place was quiet. A breeze moved through the trees. I poked my head inside one of the soft-sided s. In the area, I noticed that park employees were living in tent cabins next to the notorious signature cabins, separated only by a wooden fence.
Which threw me. August 30, Case Count: 10 Deaths: 3. FAQ: U. Visitors to Yosemite. Case Count. Epi Curve. Related Links. Links with this icon indicate that you are leaving the CDC website. Linking to a non-federal website does not constitute an endorsement by CDC or any of its employees of the sponsors or the information and products presented on the website.
You will be subject to the destination website's privacy policy when you follow the link. CDC is not responsible for Section compliance accessibility on other federal or private website. Cancel Continue. But in less than 10 days, those symptoms give way to coughing and shortness of breath as the lungs fill with fluid. Hantavirus can enter the body through the mouth and nose by breathing or ingesting in tiny particles of rodent feces, urine or saliva, according to the CDC.
In rare cases, it has also been transmitted through rodent bites. Hantavirus cannot pass from person to person through touching, kissing or blood transfusions. Since it was first identified in , fewer than cases of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome have been reported nationwide, more than a third of which have been fatal, according to the CDC. Most people are exposed to the virus in their own homes, according to the National Institutes of Health.
But campers might have a heightened risk because of close contact with forest floors and musty cabins. Hantavirus has been detected in deer mice at the Curry Village Campground, according to park officials.
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