Medpage Today How long has Sin Nombre hantavirus lived in North America? Glowing embers cascading from Glacier Point. The ancient granite of Tuolumne Meadows. The Mist Trail leading to Vernal Falls. All these memories and more were treasured by my mom — a native Californian who loved Yosemite National Park. My mother also loved Yosemite’s canvas-covered cabins where she often stayed during childhood summers.
But now that a dozen years have passed since deceptively cute deer-mice invaded some of those cabins’ foam insulation, then shed a virus that gravely sickened eight people and killed three of them, I can’t help but wonder: decades earlier, could the same fate have befallen my mom? Similarly, did certain people in the American Southwest suffer the dire illness called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) long before 1993, when the U.S. recorded its first official outbreak in Arizona and New Mexico? In that instance, 15 of 17 early sufferers died from inhaling an agent aerosolized from the feces, urine, or saliva of Peromyscus maniculatus mice that was later christened Sin Nombre virus (SNV) — the virus that causes HPS.