Your chances of getting hantavirus largely depends on where you live.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 94 percent of cases occur west of the Mississippi. In 1993, an outbreak erupted in the Four Corners region where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. In this instance, 53 persons developed a complication from hantavirus infection known as hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, leading to 32 deaths.
Typically, humans get hantavirus by breathing in infected particles from rodent urine, droppings, or saliva. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory note that drier air in the West likely allows the virus to persist in the environment and aerosolize (become airborne) rather than get washed away into storm drains, as is more likely in the wetter eastern United States.
Wild rodent populations that carry the hantavirus thrive in certain rural hot spots in these western regions. These carriers include the deer mouse, white-footed mouse, and cotton mouse.
“In the U.S, the deer mouse is the primary carrier of the hantavirus most associated with human illness, although they carry the virus without becoming sick themselves,” says Kelly Cawcutt, MD, an associate professor in the division of infectious diseases and pulmonary and critical care medicine at University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. “The more common house mice and urban rats are not known to carry the strains typically linked to severe hantavirus disease.”
Because the cruise in the latest outbreak originated in Argentina, some health officials suspect that the source of infections may have been the long-tailed pygmy rice rat, which is a primary carrier for the Andes hantavirus variant in South America. This variant is not found in North America and is the only kind associated with human to human transmission, which appears to have occurred on the cruise ship.
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