Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome is a rodent-borne viral disease agent that exists in rodent populations throughout the Americas and in much of Asia and Europe. Most of these viruses have been recognized within the last seven years especially in America. Each virus is generally associated with four types of mice. Theses mice are the deer mouse, rice rat, cotton rat, and the white-footed mouse. .
Human diseases likely caused by hantaviruses were recognized at least as early as World War I, and were responsible for illness in over 3000 United Nations troops during the Korean conflict. However, it was not until 1976 that a Hantavirus was first isolated from a striped field mouse captured along the banks of the Hantaan River, near the border between North and South Korea. (RN 16).
Where exactly does the Hantavirus come from? The Hantavirus disease was virtually unknown in the Americas until 1993, when a physician at the Indian Health Service in New Mexico reported that two previously healthy young people had died from acute respiratory failure. Over the next few days, additional cases were identified by the State medical examiners office and by other IHS physicians. CDC eventually identified the new virus through improved techniques of microbiology and was able to isolate where it was coming from. Heavy rodent populations were dominant in all of the areas that these patients had been living around. .
While the symptoms and effects of this disease were quite different from illnesses seen in European and Asian cases, scientists were able to quickly identify and characterize the new virus and to implicate its primary host as the deer mouse, Peromyscus maniculatus. The virus causes Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome or HPS in humans. .
Three additional hantaviruses, hosted by three other species of rodents, also are recognized as agents of HPS in the United States. The New York virus, hosted by the white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus).