Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 22, 1995 TAG: 9501230084
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ Alf Loidl is a Tasmanian with long-distance hiking in his blood. He's tramped more than 6,800 miles in the United States alone, and conquered both the Appalachian and Pacific Crest trails.
Eighteen months ago, something else infected Loidl's blood.
The rare, rodent-borne hantavirus he contracted along the Appalachian Trail in Virginia nearly killed him.
But Loidl, a 61-year-old retired schoolteacher, recovered. In a telephone interview last week, he said he had no apprehension about leaving Australia's island state of Tasmania last year to resume his journey.
"I wanted to prove to myself that I could finish the trail, that I was healthy enough," Loidl said. "I was just so happy to be alive that I wanted to share my experience with fellow hikers."
Loidl's joy in survival is well-founded. Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, caused by the virus, is fatal 50 percent of the time. There is no known cure.
In the summer of 1993, about the same time Loidl fell ill, the hantavirus killed dozens of people in the Southwest United States. Since then, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded 98 cases in 21 states, 51 of them fatal.
When Loidl walked off the trail at Caledonia State Park 19 months ago, he had no idea what was wrong as he trudged toward Fayetteville, Pa. "I felt very lethargic, I felt very weak. I had no strength in my hands. I was finding it very, very difficult to walk those four miles to the hotel," Loidl said.
He asked the hotel manager's husband to take him to a doctor. It was a Saturday, and doctors' offices were closed, so his driver took him to the Chambersburg hospital. A physician there issued a prescription for antibiotics and told him to return if he didn't feel better.
The next day, June 27, 1993, Loidl felt worse, returned to the doctor and was admitted to the Chambersburg hospital almost immediately as his breathing deteriorated rapidly.
Loidl said he asked the doctor to call his wife, and told him all of his hiking gear was back at the hotel in Fayetteville. "Within an hour, I just went from being able to speak and move around to not remembering anything."
He lost consciousness, and doctors kept his lungs and kidneys working with a respirator and dialysis machine. The next day, he was airlifted to a larger hospital in Hershey, Pa., about 60 miles away.
His wife, Maggie, a nurse, flew from Australia to be at his side. His walking partners, Max and Stuart MacDonald, a father and son in the Hobart Hiking Club back home, came to see him before continuing northward. They were known collectively on the trail that summer as the "Tasmanian Devils."
After 25 days in intensive care at Hershey and the loss of 56 of his 175 pounds, Loidl awoke. "They turned off all the machines ... and they got me up and started doing physical therapy. The first day I was in a wheelchair, the second on crutches, the third day out of hospital," Loidl said.
He remained in Hershey another two weeks while doctors monitored his recovery. "I was extremely weak. I could only walk about five minutes at a very slow pace without having to stop and rest," Loidl said. "My memory was foggy." Finally, Loidl returned home and spent three months regaining his strength, sight and memory.
The only reminders of his ordeal are some slight liver damage and occasional memory problems, Loidl said.
Last year, he returned to the Appalachian Trail to complete his hike. He finished on Baxter Peak, the summit of Maine's 5,267-foot Mount Katahdin, on Aug. 31. In September, he visited Hershey and Chambersburg to thank the doctors who helped save his life.
They accepted his gratitude, some hats stamped "Tasmania," and a blood sample, which they forwarded to the CDC in Atlanta. The blood showed antibodies for the "sin nombre" strain of the hantavirus, one of at least three versions identified east of the Mississippi, according to a CDC report on the case. Loidl's was the first confirmed case of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome in the Mid-Atlantic.
The state Health Department announced the case in mid-November, based on the CDC's tests. But officials withheld Loidl's identity, based on a policy of protecting patient confidentiality. Tracked down and contacted by the Roanoke Times & World-News, Loidl said he wanted to tell his story.
Both the Health Department and the Appalachian Trail Conference, the private, nonprofit group responsible for maintaining the 2,100-mile footpath, have said there is little danger to hikers as long as they observe common-sense precautions, especially around hiking shelters, which are typically infested with deer mice. The same precautions - letting enclosed, mouse-infested rooms air out and wetting down dusty areas with disinfectant before cleaning them - can apply to people who live in rural areas and are used to seeing mice.
Loidl has no idea where or how he became infected with the hantavirus, although based on the typical incubation period he said it must have been somewhere in the Shenandoah National Park, which begins some 130 trail miles north of Troutville and the Roanoke area. Tests from 1993 found hantavirus-infected mice in Madison and Rappahannock counties, portions of which are in the park.
A native of New York City, Loidl moved to Australia in 1958 to join his wife in Hobart, Tasmania. He is now an Australian citizen. Loidl grew up taking short hikes on the trail in New Jersey and New York. "I always wanted to complete the whole trail."
In 1982, he did just that after taking a leave of absence from his job, teaching science and math to seventh- to 10th-graders. He believes he was the first Australian to hike the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail end-to-end. Two years later, he trekked the 2,600-mile Pacific Crest Trail, which follows the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Range from southern California to northern Washington state.
Loidl came back to Virginia in 1987 and gave a slide presentation to an Appalachian Trail Conference gathering in Lynchburg on hiking in Tasmania - a temperate, lightly populated and mountainous island of marsupials, including kangaroos, wombats and Tasmanian devils.
Loidl returned to the trail on June 18 last year at Harpers Ferry, W.Va. The town at the junction of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers is the headquarters of the conference and the footpath's psychological midpoint (the geographic halfway varies from year to year because of trail relocations but is near Caledonia State Park).
Two men he had met in '93 accompanied him: Bob Perkins, a retired Navy man from Missouri nicknamed "Sailor Bob"; and David Cornell, a retired lawyer from Michigan, who went by the trail name of "One-Step."
Cornell stayed on the trail until Bear Mountain, beside the Hudson River in New York. Perkins climbed Katahdin with Loidl.
Despite his life-threatening experience, Loidl remains upbeat about long-distance hiking and the value of an end-to-end hike of the Appalachian Trail. In the future, he would like to hike the 200-mile John Muir Trail in California and the nearly 500-mile Colorado Trail in the Rockies. "It's certainly an experience in a lifetime, that feeling of self-satisfaction and being in tune with the elements."
by CNB