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Yosemite Expands Scope of Hantavirus Warning: More than 20,000 At Risk
redletterdave writes "In response to a recent outbreak of a deadly pulmonary disease commonly carried by mice and other rodents, Yosemite National Park has doubled the scope of those likely infected by hantavirus. Given the rising number of confirmed cases (currently eight) and deaths (three), U.S. officials have effectively sounded a worldwide alert for more than 22,000 local and international visitors that may have been exposed to the deadly virus. Health officials initially believed as many as 10,000 people were at risk to contracting the hantavirus after staying in Yosemite's popular Curry Village lodging area between the months of June and August.; unfortunately, that 10,000 'at risk' estimate was low. Officials expanded the warning this week to an additional 12,000 visitors to Yosemite's High Sierra camps, now that the eighth case of hantavirus was confirmed in a man who stayed in those camp areas. Furthermore, more than 2,500 of those individuals currently live outside the United States."
Both start with an S...
Don't sniff the mouse poop!
I'm glad I picked Yellowstone instead.
To put that into perspective, three junkies just went to see their maker in the last hour !! And for each hour of every day, of every week, of every month, year after year !!
Not that that's bad, mind you !!
This is the beginning...
Fortunately, this isn't a virus easy to pass between humans. Unfortunately, it is one of the contagions in our biological weapon program.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Great. First the supervolcano under Yellowstone, now deadly virus from Yosemite.
You nature lovers and conservationists feel good about yourselves for preserving it? Huh?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/outbreaks/yosemite-national-park-2012.html
National Park Service: http://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/hantafaq.htm
WHO (via TFA): http://www.who.int/csr/don/2012_09_04/en/index.html
Am I the only one who does not see the quoted number of 20,000 on either website?
TFA, on the other hand, links to Fox News.
I don't get it. 22,000 people went to Yellowstone Park to have sex with mice and other rodents?
Time to go long on cats? *buy* *buy* *buy*
There is a cheap generalized virucide, intravenous sodium ascorbate, little known inside of corporate, fascist and socialist controlled medical circles. Really nasty viruses may take 200-300 grams C per day, or even more, along with supportive nutrients like oral B-50 complex (50 is a size/strength). Under 50 to 100 grams of IV C per (first) day is more typical of common, severe viral infections. See Thomas Levy, Curing the Incurable
From my own experience at CV this summer, the management company DNC charges a small fortune to stay in the tents ($140 per night including tax), which are hot, stuffy, dirty, rodent infested, and have no running water. Warnings are all over the place about bears and securing your food. DNC offers lame excuses for not having previously posted warnings about hantavirus. We heard at least one rodent in our tent at night, which should have been far more concerning at the time.
"Complementary wifi" is also provided at the Curry Village guest lounge, but the network is so slow (1.5 Mbps) it can handle no more than a few users at a time. Literally about a hundred people try to use the network simultaneously during the day and evening. It's no exaggeration: everybody sits around staring at each other, waiting for their laptops, tablets and smartphones to achieve connectivity.
Somebody is making a fortune off Curry Village, and it probably isn't the workers.
Anybody else think the /. moderators can be idiots?
The lack of intelligent postings really turns me off to this site.
Why after all these years are people still using Krusty Brand Chew Goo Gum Like Substance?
Monstar L
I (with my family) hiked round the High Sierra camps last year, with a small group guided by one of the park rangers. He said he'd never met anyone else from outside the US on one of those trips. Kind of surprising that they mention such a high number of non-US visitors in the press release.
Government of Madagascar shuts down shipyards due to safety concerns.
President Nixon terminated the United States offensive biological weapons program by executive order.
Note the word offensive.
Official policies
War on drugs: Defensive
Iraq war #1: Defensive
War on terror: Defensive
Iraq war #2: Defensive
Afghanistan: Defensive
I live too close to one of the largest biodefence research companies for the US Military. It is frightening when someone moves in next door and they tell you their job is in infectious disease propagation improvement. Sure it is to find better ways to stop the spread and kill the next pandemic, but when you have a drawer full of hammers.....
This seems like a typical situation that we see in the West arising from: (1) the legacy of heedless 19th-century attitudes toward the environment and (2) unrealistic expectations about human interaction with the environment.
A hundred years ago, people did all kinds of things to cherished natural resources that they'd never do today. San Francisco dammed Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite's twin that was reputed to be even more beautiful than Yosemite. Until ca. 1950, people intentionally fed bears in Yosemite Valley for entertainment, and sent burning logs over Yosemite Falls at night for people down in the valley to watch. They put permanent steps and cables on the back of Half Dome, which is something that just isn't a normal thing to do on a peak in the Sierra. And they developed the hell out of Yosemite Valley, turning it from a natural cathedral into an asphalt parking lot with big-city-style smog problems in the summer high season. All of these things have had negative consequences. A bunch of people have died on Half Dome, so they've had to start rationing access. Bear-human interactions, which are very, very seldom an issue in the undeveloped backcountry, are a huge problem in specific places, especially Yosemite Valley. And now we have hantavirus, which doesn't seem to be a big problem either in the city or in the backcountry.
People also have unrealistic expectations about how they can live alongside the environment. People build houses in beautiful forests, refuse to clear defensible space around their houses because they like the trees, and then yelp to the government to put out forest fires so their houses don't burn down. The result is that we build up tinder for decades, and then get huge, catastrophic fires that, unlike the many smaller fires that would naturally occur, have negative environmental effects. An example was the huge Station Fire in the San Gabriels a few years back. Various opportunistic species have taken over in the disturbed habitat. One of the worst of these is purple poodle bush, which is sort of like poison oak except ten times worse -- it gets microscopic needles under your skin like little syringes injecting you with the irritating chemical. The stuff is ordinarily pretty rare (thank God), but in the burned areas it's taking over like crazy.
It's not realistic to imagine that you can have a natural environment in Yosemite Valley with the population density they're trying to support. Why is it a surprise if they get disease-carrying rodents? If it was undeveloped backcountry, you wouldn't have a big enough supply of garbage to feed such a high density of mice. If it was a city, you could exterminate the mice. You can't do any of that in an environment that's basically a high-density suburb that you're pretending is a wilderness.
The guvmint-based solution is to scale back the density of development in Yosemite Valley radically, and also to stop allowing people to drive private cars into the valley.
As an individual, there are a couple of positive things you can do: (1) Instead of driving your car into Yosemite Valley, take the YARTS bus from a nearby town like Mariposa. (2) If you live in the Bay Area, please show a little originality by not doing the same stuff that everybody else does. The two things that people want to do are (a) climbing Half Dome as a day hike and (b) overnight backpacking in Little Yosemite. These areas are heavily overimpacted. Try something else. The Sierra is a big place.
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All these viruses (virii??), like Hanta Virus, Ebola Virus, Nipah Virus, and so on ... are they new?
If they are not new - that is, they already existed for a long time, it's just that they have been accurately been identified recently - then I'll imagine that hundreds of years ago, or even thousands of years ago human populations must had had "contacts" with them and were infected as well ...
My question is: If humans did suffered past epidemics of those viruses, how come there wasn't any record on it?
Or is it a case of human evolution - or recent changes to human environments (much more hygienic) - that resulted in a decline of human immunological response to many types of viruses?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Read the stats... 22,000 people exposed too Hanta virus and 3 people die. You have an immune system that protects you from all infections and cancerous cells. It's a miracle of life... a cue that there's been intelligent design... But when you get old, your body for no apparent reason gets decrepit and suceptable to infections. If you're interested in reading a concise book about how to avoid or treat diseases, read "The Healthcare Guide for Republicans," real stories about common illnesses, medical errors, effective treatments, how to get free Healthcare in any hospital in the U.S., ebook at Amazon or Apple. Don't worry about Hanta Virus, it usually only kills people who are immuno suppressed. If you want to know when the mass extinction will occur on Earth, google red tides, ocean dead zones or mass fish kills. Global warming is a crok, but agricultural runoff (insecticides, nitrates, poisons) are killing our oceans. Why should you care? Our oceans make 75% of the Earth's oxygen. Be scared, you might only have 20 years left to live. mensunion org
Not smallpox or some other European disease, but rather hantavirus, that mutated to become person-to-person contagious.
Per their theory, it was deadlier to the Aztecs than to the Europeans because Europeans had larger genetic variability than the native american populace.
The documentary I saw on the topic made a pretty convincing case for it being something unknown to Europeans, because the missionaries who were there at the time didn't recognise it as smallpox. Their term for it translates to English as "the Great Pest".
They also made the case that it was hantavirus, because weather conditions in the two years previous were conducive to an explosion of rodents that were carriers: a long drought followed by several wet years, leading to a rodent population explosion.
--PM