Tuesday, April 30, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
"This is both good news and bad news for people who like the outdoors," biologist John Boone said on Monday.
"On the down side, infected deer mice are found in all kinds of habitats except right in town. However, human hantavirus cases are rare."
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported earlier this month that there had been 131 confirmed cases of the virus nationally since it was first identified in 1993 with a 49.6 percent mortality rate.
Two people have died from the disease in Nevada, one of 24 states where it has been reported. Five others have fallen ill, but have recovered.
Most people who have contracted the virus, which causes severe cardiopulmonary illness, work outdoors and around animals. Several people on Indian reservations in the Southwest died of hantavirus infection in 1993.
But the Nevada research neither showed a relationship between high numbers of rodents and infection rates nor a correlation between infection rates and where the mice lived, Boone said.
He and microbiology student Joe Blattman trapped and ear-tagged 1,200 rodents at 50 sites in the Walker River Basin southwest of here from May through November of last year.
Infection rates among deer and pinyon mice ranged from none to 50 percent, but supported the 12 percent average reported last year by university scientists, Boone said.
Microbiologists Steve St. Jeor and Elmer Otteson examined DNA from the rodents and found that the viruses evolve for long times. One type of hantavirus showed up more often in humans than others did.
Working under a five-year, $1.5 million grant, the researchers have returned to the basin to recapture tagged rodents to learn whether the virus affects some subspecies more than others and to refine habitat data.
Their ultimate goal is to develop a vaccine.
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