American Indian Culture and Research Journal

When bubonic plague ravaged London in 1665, on hand to witness the event was author Daniel Defoe. Although he was only five years of age at the time, he built on that experience to craft a journalistic narrative of the epidemic, his Journal of the Plague Year. He relates that: “It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland . . . whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet.” The plague was not native to Europe. It first emerged there three hundred years earlier, in 1348, and became known as the Black Death. It killed one-third of the population in just five years, about 25 million people. Perhaps 200 million people died by the end of the fourteenth century. The London epidemic witnessed by Defoe probably left one hundred thousand dead, about a fifth of the city’s population. A catastrophe of this magnitude is no longer part of our common experience. Plague, cholera, smallpox, typhus, and similar contagions have been banished to history or the Third World. These natural disasters have no visible cause and spread with alarming speed. When they suddenly appear on our doorstep we are quite rightly shaken. And when the disease is unknown to science, we are thrown back to the world experienced by Defoe’s Londoners, albeit with confidence that scientists will soon have an explanation if not an answer. Hantavirus first emerged in the spring of 1993 on the Navajo Reservation. Although it is by no means an “Indian disease”—there are four times as many cases of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) among non-Indians (see table 1)—it has disproportionately affected Native Americans. Hantavirus is carried by the ubiquitous deer mouse. Close contact with mice in a dwelling is strongly associated with hantavirus and the resulting illness, HPS.