Deadly Yosemite virus warning to 10,000 US campers

[xchrom]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19447160


The warning applies to visitors who stayed in the cabins at Curry Village from mid-June onward

Thousands of people could be at risk from a deadly virus in California's Yosemite National Park that has already claimed two lives, officials say.

Four other cases of Hantavirus, a rare lung disease, have been reported.

The park said it is getting about 1,000 calls per day from frightened visitors on its Hantavirus hotline.

There is no known cure for the virus, spread by infected rodent droppings. Symptoms can take up to six weeks to show and one third of cases are fatal.

[Hubert Flottz]

1. It took those mice a long time to get from Dugway to the park.

This could be another terrorist attack, like the anthrax attacks.

Were Four Corners Victims Biowar Casualties?
By John Horgan, Scientific American, November 1993

Could a mysterious disease that has taken at least 16 lives in the Four Corners region of the Southwest since this past May be related to the U.S. biological warfare program? In June, federal and state investigators blamed the outbreak on hantaviruses. Although hantavirus-related illnesses were unknown in the U.S. before this year, they have been studied by military and civilian researchers since the 1950s, when U.S. troops fighting in Korea became infected with a flulike disease that attacks the kidneys.

The virus, named after Korea's Hantaan River, is carried by rodents and is transmitted by airborne particles of the feces or urine of infected animals. The Four Corners illnesses were almost certainly caused in this way, asserts C. Mack Sewell, an epidemiologist for the state of New Mexico, who notes that the virus had previously been detected in deer mice in the area.
Rumors have nonetheless persisted among Native Americans and others in the Four Corners region that Fort Wingate, an army base near the epicenter of the epidemic, was somehow involved. In June, Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico queried the Pentagon about possible biological warfare activities at the base. The Pentagon acknowledged that the fort was once used as a storage depot for chemical weapons but denied that biological weapons were ever held or tested there.

Yet Fort Wingate has served as a target site, or "impact zone," for missiles launched from other military bases, according to a former congressional investigator who requested anonymity. One possible launch site is the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, several hundred miles to the north. The army has conducted experiments at Dugway with both chemical and biological agents for decades. Dugway earned notoriety in 1968 when a jet aircraft from the site accidentally released nerve gas over a nearby ranch and killed thousands of sheep. Read More...

http://www.project-112shad-fdn.com/four_corners.htm

More information on Dugway...

http://www.project-112shad-fdn.com/index.htm#biological agents