Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 20, 1995 TAG: 9501200082
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER CHRISTIANSBURG
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The deer mice died in vain.
None of the 74 mice trapped last month in hiking shelters and woods along the Appalachian Trail in Giles County, then killed and dissected, tested positive for hantavirus, the state Health Department announced Thursday.
Federal and state officials were hoping the tests would help them piece together where a 1993 long-distance hiker contracted the rare, deadly and rodent-borne hantavirus while trekking through Virginia on the Appalachian Trail.
``This does not mean that the virus is not here,'' said Dr. Craig Smith, director of the Mount Rogers Health District. ``We're certainly not out of the woods yet.''
Health officials now will have to do more testing farther north in the spring and summer.
``We were extremely disappointed, in a manner of speaking, and surprised,'' said Smith, who also is acting director of the New River Health District. ``It was a fairly labor-intensive sampling.''
The hiker, a 61-year-old Australian, spent nearly a month in a Pennsylvania hospital suffering from hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which nearly killed him. He went through lung and kidney failures before beginning a slow, complete recovery.
The disease, which has killed 51 of the 98 people infected since 1993, typically has a two-week incubation period, though it can be as long as 45 days. Investigators had focused on Giles County by comparing the typical incubation time with the hiker's diary of places he had visited and stayed. Giles also was a likely suspect because an infected mouse had been trapped in 1993 at the Mountain Lake Biological Station, just a few miles from the trail. But Smith and other officials have said they don't know where the hiker picked up the hantavirus.
Other tests in 1993 also found it in Madison and Rappahannock counties. The Appalachian Trail passes through Shenandoah National Park in portions of those counties.
The virus is carried by deer mice and other wild rodents, and can become airborne through their urine, saliva and droppings. The state Health Department says the risk of catching hantavirus infection is low, but still advises common-sense precautions, such as airing out mouse-infested cabins, barns and sheds and spraying dusty areas with a disinfectant before cleaning them out.
Dr. James Mills, a Virginia Tech graduate and epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, coordinated the Dec. 5-8 live trapping of the mice from six Giles locations, primarily on the trail in the areas of Sugar Run, Pearis and Peters mountains.
``The procedures are complicated, scientifically precise and not without some risk,'' Mills said in a news release. ``We will be exporting this expertise to more northern parts of the state as well as to additional areas of Southwest Virginia.''
Two factors may have influenced the negative test results. One is the time of year, just before the beginning of winter. ``There is little known about the seasonal incidence of hantavirus in the mouse. It could be that fall and winter are periods of low incidence in our area,'' Smith said.
The second factor is that most of the mice were young, probably born during the fall. ``We know that the prevalence of infection is lower in very young rodents,'' he said.
by CNB