takes between one and five weeks after the initial contact with the virus before victims start showing symptoms of the illness. These early symptoms can vary significantly from person to person. While most people will feel fatigue, fever and muscle aches in the large muscle groups. Other may also experience chills, dizziness, and abdominal pains. A week later, infected people will begin to experience coughing and a shortness of breath as their lungs fill with fluid. It is important to note that most hanta virus victims became ill even though they did not see rodents or their dropping, and others have had a large amount of contact with both before they became sick (CDC.gov pg. 1). Because of the wide variety of symptoms, hanta virus has gone through several different names.“The common clinical features among the case-patients included a prodromial illness of fever, chills, and myalgia. The prodrome was followed by dyspnea, cough, throbocytopenia, severe hemodynamic instability, neutrophilid with immature forms, atypical lymphocytes, elevated serum levels of lactate dehydrogenase. There was a high mortality rate, approximately eighty percent in the initial group of patients, the chest x-ray examinations revealed a diffuse, interstitial infiltrate that resembled that observed in patients with adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which is a common pattern in patients who are extremely ill from any of a variety of diseases (E.G. bacterial sepsis or trauma). The disease was thus called Unexplained ARDS (hanta.html).While hanta virus is a potentially deadly disease, there are ways of safeguarding oneself against infections. Rodents carry Hanta virus: rice rats, deer mice and cotton rats. These are just a few of the known carriers of the virus. In a process known as aerosolization, tiny particles of the virus are made airborne when rodent droppings, urine or saliva are disturbed. This is the primary means of infection....
