Dark Fields

In May 1993, two young people in rural New Mexico died within five days of each other. Both had been healthy. Both developed what seemed like flu. Both died of acute respiratory failure. The investigation that followed their deaths revealed a virus that had been living in the American landscape since long before any European set foot on it - carried silently by the deer mouse through the high desert and piñon forests of the Southwest, invisible to science until a cluster of deaths forced a reckoning that could no longer be avoided.

The Four Corners outbreak of 1993 introduced the world to Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome - a disease that kills approximately 35 to 40 percent of those it infects and that, for more than thirty years, has had no approved vaccine and no approved specific treatment. But the Hantavirus story does not begin in 1993. It begins in the rice fields of Korea where American soldiers were dying of a mysterious kidney disease in the 1950s, in the northern European forests where bank vole population cycles have been driving epidemics of hemorrhagic fever for generations, and in the Argentine and Chilean Patagonia where the only known person-to-person transmissible Hantavirus continues to kill in communities that have been waiting for a vaccine since the disease was first identified.

Dark Fields is the complete story of the Hantavirus - its biology, its history, its global distribution across fifty-plus species on every inhabited continent, its current outbreak crisis in South America, and the state of the science that is still working to develop the vaccines and treatments that would make it preventable and survivable for everyone at risk. Written for the general reader by the author of Fever Country, it is the definitive account of a disease that is older than human civilisation and more dangerous than most people know.