http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443779404577641862233253188.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Yosemite Knocked for Virus Response
By VAUHINI VARA and BETSY MCKAY
Some recent visitors to Yosemite National Park have expressed concern that park employees allowed them to be potentially exposed to a deadly rodent-borne disease, even after workers knew previous visitors had contracted the disease.
Eight people are known to have contracted hantavirus pulmonary syndrome between June and mid-August, and three of them died, Yosemite reported last week. The dead include a Kanawha County, W.Va., resident who stayed at Yosemite in June and died within two weeks of the trip.
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All but one of the ill stayed in a set of 91 cabins in the park's Curry Village area. The eighth visited several High Sierra camps in another part of the park, had mild symptoms and is now recovering, according to Yosemite.
Hantavirus is contracted by breathing in small viral particles released into the air from the urine or droppings of infected deer mice or other rodents. There is no known cure, and about 38% of those who contract the disease die.
The incubation period can range from six days to six weeks. Symptoms include fever and headache, but the telltale sign is shortness of breath, or "the impression that you have something in your lungs when you're breathing," said Pierre Rollin, an outbreak investigator at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some visitors are criticizing the park's response as slow. While Yosemite knew by Aug. 16 of two cases of hantavirus—including one death—and California public health officials suspected their illness could be linked to their stay in the cabins, visitors were allowed to check into the cabins.
Alex Dimitriu and his wife checked into their tent cabin on Aug. 25. At that time, no park employee mentioned the outbreak or that Curry Village was ground zero for the infections, he said.
"I can't tell you how reckless I feel this is," said the Mountain View, Calif., psychiatrist, who also brought his 5-month-old son. "If you have an amusement-park ride where people are dying, you don't keep the ride open while you fix it."
He said he saw a general warning sign about hantavirus posted at the bathroom after he had gotten settled, but it didn't lead him to believe that the cabin he was staying in would put his family at risk.
Then, on his way home on Aug. 27, Dr. Dimitriu said he received an email from Yosemite notifying visitors that four park visitors who had stayed at the cabins had contracted hantavirus and two had died. It warned visitors to be alert for possible symptoms.
Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman said park officials started deeply cleaning the cabins on Aug. 16. "We feel that we took the most transparent approach possible," said Mr. Gediman. "As new information became available, we took the most appropriate actions."
He declined to comment on specific visitors. On Aug. 27, 30 tents were still occupied, he said.
Yosemite decided to close the cabins after health officials received test results on Aug. 27 on mice trapped in the area since Aug. 16. The tests showed the hantavirus infection rate among deer mice was at its normal rate of about 14%, but there were "many more mice" than usual in the area, the spokeswoman said. Health officials also found some cabins were vulnerable to the mice entering.
The cabins were closed on Aug. 28, after six cases had been confirmed, including two deaths. A spokeswoman for the California Department of Public Health said no cases have been confirmed in people who stayed at Yosemite after Aug. 16.
Chris Reid, 61, checked into a nearby area of Curry Village on Aug. 16, the day that Yosemite learned of the first hantavirus cases. She said nobody notified her family of the risk during their stay. Even though they stayed a few minutes' walk from the cabins where the infected visitors had been, she said she would have left altogether had she known of the problem because her immune system had already been compromised by a recent bout of Lyme disease.
"They were completely irresponsible," she said.
Knowing what action to take can be difficult as an outbreak unfolds. Between 20 and 30 cases are reported annually across the country, Dr. Rollin said. "You can say what if, what if," he said. "They did very good things to contact everybody."
The tent cabins will have to be modified before they can be inhabited again, he said, because their current design, with a fabric wall outside and dry wall inside, have a space between them which rodents have clearly accessed.
Mr. Gediman said the cabins are closed "indefinitely."
The outbreak has convinced some prospective Yosemite visitors to change their plans. David Brock, a musician, had for months been planning a trip with his girlfriend to several High Sierra camps. When Yosemite said last week that one High Sierra visitor had fallen ill, Mr. Brock canceled his trip.
A version of this article appeared September 10, 2012, on page A3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Yosemite Knocked for Virus Response.
