Chapter 15: All in Good Haste and Chapter 16: Nature and Homo Sapiens Summary and Analysis

In Chapter 15, an outbreak of a respiratory illness that caused death broke out in reservations in New Mexico in 1993. After at least nineteen cases, with twelve deaths, and after failing to find a cause for the disease, epidemiologist Jay Butler began to work on the issue with the CDC. Eventually, the researchers discovered the virus was a hantavirus. First seen in 1951 in the Korean war, the hantavirus was carried by field mice. In the New Mexico area, an increase in vegetation due to moist weather helped explode the rodent population, and researchers eventually found the virus in deer mice. Soon, outbreaks of the disease spread throughout the United States, and other strains of the disease began cropping up. The virus was...