Five people
have been stricken with the rare, rodent-borne hantavirus illness in Washington
state since February, three of whom have died, in the state's worst
outbreak of
the disease in at least 18 years, public health officials reported on Thursday.
The three
fatal cases also mark the highest death toll from hantavirus pulmonary syndrome
in Washington state during a single year since the respiratory ailment was
first identified in the "Four Corners" region of the U.S. Southwest
in 1993.
The disease
has been found to be transmitted to humans from deer mice, either through
contact with urine, droppings, saliva or nesting materials of infected rodents
or by inhaling dust contaminated with the virus.
Victims in
the latest outbreak were men and women ranging in age from their 20s to their
50s from four counties across the state, said David Johnson, spokesman for the
Washington State Department of Health.
The first
diagnosed case this year was in February and the most recent was last month,
when the infection killed a resident of Spokane County in the eastern part of
the state near Washington's border with Idaho. Three of the five cases, including
another one that proved fatal, were confirmed in the Puget Sound region of King
and Skagit counties.
The only
common factor among those infected by the disease, which typically kills more
than a third of its victims, is that they were all exposed to infected mice,
Johnson said.
The last
time five confirmed hantavirus cases were diagnosed in Washington state in a
single year was in 1999, although just one of those proved fatal, Johnson said.
Washington
has reported 49 of the 690 hantavirus cases tallied nationwide from 1993 to
January 2016, ranking fifth among 10 Western states that account for the bulk
of all documented infections, according to the federal Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta.
Eighteen
infections with four deaths were reported nationally in 2015. The year before,
the CDC counted 35 cases, of which 14 were fatal.
The most
highly publicized hantavirus outbreak occurred in 2012, when 10 visitors to
Yosemite National Park in California were diagnosed with the infection, three
of whom died, prompting a worldwide alert. All but one of those were linked to
tent cabins later found to have been infested by deer mice.
Reuters
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