Year of Fear
Medicine men knew cause of Hantavirus

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — In the spring of 1987, people living in New York stayed inside, with their doors locked, as a killer named the Son of Sam roamed the streets, killing at will.

Residents of this area experienced the same kind of fear 15 years ago this week, as a silent killer ended the life of several young Navajo. No one could figure how what was killing them — it was Hantavirus.

For two weeks, as the number of deaths increased, local doctors like Bruce Tempest, who was a specialist in internal medicine at the Gallup Indian Medical Hospital, worked around the clock examining patients who were flocking to IHS hospitals worried that they may have caught the disease that was causing people to die only a few days after showing the symptoms.

“This was one of the most intense periods of my life,” Tempest said. “There was enormous stress.”

Today it’s hard to imagine the fear that radiated not only through this area but all through the Southwest as people began learning of the deaths of young Navajo and began wondering if this was the beginning of an outbreak that would eventually spread to other parts of the country.

Local restaurant owners reported a sharp decline in business. A lot of people stopped going to the movies. There were even reports in Phoenix that restaurants there discouraged Navajo from eating at their establishments and when they did, the owners would throw away the plates they used rather than taking a chance passing on the disease to their customers. Very few people visited the Inter-Tribal Ceremonial that summer.

Some people began wearing surgical masks when they went outdoors. If you didn’t have to go outdoors, you didn’t.
Tempest blamed the media for writing stories that indicated the disease was only affecting the area’s Navajo population and indicating that it may be passed on from person to person. Most of the early victims were Navajo but it turned out that the disease was concentrated in rural areas and not targeting any specific ethic group.

For Tempest and other doctors in this area, the first time they became aware that there was this mysterious disease killing people was on May 14, 1993.

That was the day that a young Navajo from north of Gallup died. What made the death unusual was that the man’s fiancé had died from the same symptoms just a few days before.

“It all came together on that day,” Tempest said. Another IHS doctor, Larry Crook, had one of his patients die of the same symptoms a few days before and Tempest learned that there had also been a similar death at the Fort Defiance Hospital about the same time. He was able to track down five recent deaths to the disease.

“This didn’t look like anything I had ever seen before,” he said. “We basically had five young, healthy people who came down with the disease and then died within a few days of showing symptoms.”

Was it being passed from one family member to another? Some though so since so many of the early deaths were concentrated in one area and one family?

“We just didn’t know,” said Tempest, which is why during the next two weeks, doctors and nurses who were treating patients at the IHS hospitals wore surgical masks and gowns to reduce the chance of catching the disease.

Once the alert was issued, state health officials and doctors at the University of New Mexico were called for help and by the beginning of the following week the Centers for Disease Control began sending van loads of doctors and researchers to Gallup to try and find a reason for the deaths.

During the next week, three more people would die and hundreds of people were rushing to local hospitals if they had a cough or a runny nose.

By that time, Tempest said, doctors had some idea of the symptoms and concentrated their efforts on people who said they had a fever and then muscle aches and finally found themselves short of breath. The problem was that by the time they got to the end of these symptoms, it was too late.

Local newspapers had stories every day about the mysterious disease and the fact that no one still had any idea what was causing the deaths. Speculation ran rampant with Navajo officials fighting media reports that this was a Navajo disease while everyone seemed to have their own idea about what was causing it.

A lot of people were looking at the U.S. Army as being responsible.

The Army at this time was closing down their depot at Fort Wingate and were removing weapons stored there to other sites. People began wondering in the newspaper articles if the Army was storing chemical weapons and whether it was possible that some kind of chemical agent designed to kill America’s enemies had somehow managed to get out and was now killing Navajo.

Army officials denied any involvement and denied that any chemical weapons were being stored at the site. But people continued to wonder.

By May 25, as CDC doctors were closing in on the cause, so was another segment of this area’s health profession — Navajo medicine men.

It was on that date that more than 50 Navajo medicine men met in Window Rock behind closed doors and discussed the deaths and later told the Navajo people to be very careful around prairie dogs and deer mice in their area.

They had heard reports from the Navajo people living in the areas where the deaths had occurred that the rodent population in their areas had skyrocketed because of a wet winter and abundant food sources in the spring. The medicine men told of stories passed down from generation to generation warning Navajos that death and destruction would come when rodent populations became too large.

CDC officials were concluding autopsies on all of the victims as well as blood work and were beginning to think that the disease was related in some way to a disease that the U.S. Army had discovered during the Korean War — a Hantavirus that up to now had only been seen in the Eastern Hemisphere.

The Hantavirus there caused kidney failure, which was not happening here, but other symptoms were so close that doctors began wondering if the disease causing the deaths in 1993 could be spread by rodents. Tempest said that one of the things that also triggered this thinking was the discovery of mouse droppings at one of the homes where a number of people had died.

Researchers began fanning out to the areas where the victims had lived and began trapping every rodent they could find and sending them to the CDC so they could be autopsied. Within a few days, CDC officials said they had found the cause.

“It’s fortunate,” Tempest said, “that all of this occurred within a couple of weeks.”

The bad news, however, is that while CDC officials found the cause of the disease, they didn’t find a cure. In fact, there is no cure and every year, a few cases of the disease crops up each year with most surviving, although there are deaths every year.

“We’ve already had our first case this year in the Taos area,” Tempest said, adding that most of the cases in this hemisphere are now occurring in Argentina and other South America countries, although in those countries, it’s slightly different than the ones that occur in this country.

No one knows how the disease spread to this part of the country but Tempest thinks the disease may have been around for a long time but went unnoticed because they were never a lot of cases in one year until 1993.

He thinks he had a couple of cases in the years before 1993 but never realized what they were until the 1993 deaths occurred.

“I will never be able to know for sure but I believe they were also Hantavirus victims,” he said.