http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/27/health/california-yosemite-hantavirus/index.html

1 more dead after contracting hantavirus at Yosemite National Park

More than a week after announcing two vacationers had contracted hantavirus — one of them fatally — Yosemite National Park said Monday that authorities have determined another person died after contracting the disease while visiting the park.

In addition to this fatality, Yosemite said in a news release that officials had identified “a probable fourth case of hantavirus.”

All four cases involve people who stayed at the park’s popular Curry Village in mid-June. The park said its officials are trying to reach those who vacationed in these “tent cabins” from June through this month, when the accommodations were thoroughly cleaned, and urge them to get medical help if they show any symptoms of hantavirus.

Hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome is a rare but often fatal lung disease that kills about a third of those who get infected. Don Neubacher, Yosemite’s superintendent, noted that people typically don’t fall ill with hantavirus until between one and six weeks after they are exposed.

“The health of our visitors is our paramount concern, and we are making every effort to notify and inform our visitors of any potential illness,” Neubacher said.

Two contracted hantavirus while visiting Yosemite

In the United States, the carriers of hantavirus are deer mice, cotton rats, rice rats and white-footed mice, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The virus can be present in the rodents’ urine, droppings and saliva, and is spread to people when they breathe in air contaminated with the virus, the CDC says.

The virus is not communicable from person to person.

Earlier this month, the California Department of Public Health said two state residents who came down with the disease may have been exposed to mice droppings or urine that contained hantavirus while staying at the park.

Nasty.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/08/29/160272241/mysterious-new-heartland-virus-discovered-in-missouri?ft=1&f=1007&sc=tw&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Mysterious New ‘Heartland Virus’ Discovered In Missouri

Two Missouri farmers have been infected with a brand-new tick-borne virus that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is calling the Heartland virus.

The men recovered but suffered serious illness that required hospital care and weeks of convalescence. Symptoms included fever, severe fatigue, headache and nausea. Their platelet counts plummeted, but even though platelets are necessary for blood clotting, the men didn’t suffer abnormal bleeding.

A report on the new virus is in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

So far, the Missouri men are the only known cases of Heartland virus in the world. But experts are sure they’ll find more.

After all, the men lived 60 miles apart and got infected independently. That means there must be more of the mysterious new virus in the northwest Missouri environment.

“We expect to find new cases,” Dr. William Nicholson of the CDC told Shots. “We expect this thing may be wider in geographic distribution than we currently know.”

The virus is dubbed “Heartland” not only because that’s where it was discovered, but because of who found it: an astute infectious disease doctor named Scott Folk who works at Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph, Mo.

Folk is well-known to the CDC. “Whenever he sends us a sample, we pay attention because we’re likely to find something,” Nicholson says. In this case, Folk sent samples from 14 patients back in 2009.

Two of them puzzled the CDC experts — and then surprised them when electron microscope studies revealed a novel virus now called Heartland. The other dozen cases involved a more common tick-borne bacterial infection called ehrlichiosis.

“We’re pretty excited about it,” Nicholson says about the Heartland virus. “It’s not every day that you find something new — particularly in the world of tick-borne diseases. We often work with what might be considered antique diseases, such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever.”

Nicholson says the new virus is in the phlebovirus family, which contains more than 70 members. And here’s another twist: Heartland virus appears to be a cousin of another new human virus called severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome virus, discovered last year in China. Another possible cousin may be Bhanja virus, a little-studied virus that has been found in some mammals, birds and reptiles in Asia, Africa and Europe.

Nicholson says the CDC, working with Folk, is looking for other people with symptoms similar to the two Heartland victims to see if they’re infected with the same virus. The researchers are also analyzing thousands of samples from Missouri ticks, other crawling insects, and animals wild and domestic to see if any harbor Heartland virus.

Missouri ticks and other crawling insects..

starting to sound descriptive of the average septic tank.

Two campers in Yosemite National Park were infected with hantavirus in June, and one has died, public health officials announced Thursday. The pair contracted the rare disease after coming into contact with infected mouse droppings. Mice carry hantavirus. Mosquitoes carry malaria. Dogs carry rabies. What animals cause the most human disease?
Cows, pigs, and chickens. Some animal-borne illnesses garner media coverage because their symptoms and mortality rates are terrifying. Ebola, for example, causes severe internal and external bleeding and kills between 25 and 90 percent of its victims. Other diseases, like anthrax, are known for their potential as weapons of bioterrorism. But most of the illnesses we contract from animals are the decidedly less newsworthy diseases of the gastrointestinal tract. According to a study released in July, 2.3 billion people contract diarrheal illnesses annually from animals, usually from eating infected meat, eggs, or dairy products. That’s more than 10 times the number of people who get malaria each year from mosquito bites. Malaria kills a higher percentage of its victims, but the annual number of deaths from zoonotic gastrointestinal disease overall is still more than double that of malaria. Toss in a handful of other barnyard diseases, like mad cow and brucellosis, and livestock are far and away the most disease-bearing animals from a human perspective.

And continues at

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2012/08/hantavirus_in_yosemite_what_animals_cause_the_most_disease_.html

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/ticks-icaac-1/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=wiredscienceclickthru

The Outdoors Hates You: More New Tick-Borne Diseases (ICAAC 1)

This week I’m at ICAAC (the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy), a massive infectious-disease and drugs meeting that is sponsored every year by the American Society for Microbiology. ICAAC is an unabashed scary-disease geekgasm, the kind of meeting at which the editor of a major journal tweets from one room, “‘Modern medicine will come to a halt’ in India because of catastrophic multi-drug resistance” while a microbiologist alerts from another: “Rat lungworm traced to salads on a Caribbean cruise. Snails had apparently gotten to the greens.”

Good times.

Meanwhile, I was learning more about ticks.

The news last week was of a new tick-borne illness recently identified in Missouri, and of how it demonstrates the way that tick-borne infections are under-appreciated by medicine and public health, and even more by the general public. In addition to the new Heartland virus, I mentioned two other tick-borne diseases that had been identified in the past two years.

It turns out, though, that was an under-count. The news Sunday from ICAAC is that tick-related illnesses are even more common than they appear.

Dr. Bobbi Pritt, the laboratory director of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., unfolded a disease detective story that started in the summer of 2009 with two men who liked the outdoors, and two astute lab technicians. The men, a 54-year-old and a 23-year-old who had both been out in the woods in Wisconsin, had fevers, fatigue and headaches, and a history of tick bites; the 23-year-old, who had received a lung transplant for cystic fibrosis, was more seriously ill and had to be hospitalized. The technicians noted that the men’s disease was most like erlichiosis — but the tick that carries that tick-borne illness is not present in the upper Midwest. Months later — after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had sent a pair of investigators, after involving epidemiologists from the US military who had been studying illness in the residents of bases nationwide, after trapping mice and grinding up hundreds of ticks — the group realized they had found a new tick-borne illness. It was an Erlichia – though it is so new that it does not yet have a name — but it was carried by a tick species that had never been associated with that organism before. Forty-two people have been sickened by it so far. “This is not a benign disease,” Pritt warned.

Meanwhile, Dr. Peter Krause, a senior research scientist at the Yale schools of medicine and public health, described yet another formerly unknown tick-borne disease, one that is more like Lyme disease but is caused by a newly identified relative of the Lyme organism called Borrelia miyamotoi. The illness that results is a severe and sometimes fatal relapsing fever. But unlike other relapsing fevers already known to occur in the western United States, this one is carried by a different range of tick species: the “hard-bodied” ticks that are primarily in the eastern US and are responsible for transmitting Lyme, erlichiosis and anaplasmosis. So far, Krause said, this new disease has been most studied in humans in Russia — but ticks carrying B. miyamotoi have already been identified in the United States, in ticks and mice in the Northeast and upper Midwest.

Then, Dr. Gary Wormser of New York Medical College warned that a third tick-borne illness, deer tick virus — formerly known to affect only deer — is now emerging as a human pathogen. Two cases of encephalitis caused by it have been recorded. Wormser described a third, tragic case that he has not yet published: a 77-year-old man from upstate New York who already had several chronic illnesses was bitten by a tick in October 2010, developed a fever and lethargy a month later, slid into a coma — and died 8 months later, having never regained consciousness.

Finally, Dr. Barbara Herwaldt of the CDC reminded us that, even if these stories frighten you enough to never leave your house, you are still at risk of a tick-borne disease.

more on link..

12 SEPTEMBER 2012 – As of 7 Sept 2012, The National Park Service (NPS) has reported eight cases of Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) among visitors who stayed at Yosemite National Park in California since June 2012. Of these, three were fatal and five cases are recovering.

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