Yesterday 6:07 am
/////////////But birding at this landfill does not mean traipsing through the trash. The landfill itself is fenced off to the public, so visitors must observe any avian activity from the side of the road, far from the garbage—and the birds. What is more, the landfill is completely open and exposed to the elements, unlike the closed environments with limited ventilation that are typically associated with hantavirus transmission.On the rare occasions when hantavirus transmission has occurred while outside, it has been accompanied by soil or nest disturbance, after which the virus has been breathed in, explains Jennifer Mullinax of the University of Maryland, who studies wildlife ecology as it relates to zoonotic disease. But “open air, rain, etcetera quickly dilute virus particles, making it much less likely than typical indoor transmission,” she says.Local health officials have protested the spotlight on Ushuaia, the capital of province of Tierra del Fuego, which relies heavily on tourism for income. At a press conference on May 8, Juan Petrina, director of epidemiology for Tierra del Fuego, noted that there has never been a single recorded case of hantavirus in the province. “The scarcity of this rodent, combined with the province’s historical health status and the short period of time during which this couple may have been exposed to these rodents, greatly reduces the likelihood that the infection occurred here,” Petrina remarked.Petrina is not the only one challenging the focus on the Ushuaia garbage dump as the starting point of the cruise ship outbreak. “From an ecological perspective, it would be premature to attribute infection to a single location, such as the landfill, without considering the entirety of [the Dutch couple’s] travel history, including the sequence of sites visited and the amount of time spent in each habitat,” says Luis E. Escobar of Virginia Tech, who studies the ecology and biogeography of infectious diseases. He suggests that, based on the incubation period of the virus, which ranges from four to 42 days, the couple might have gotten infected in Chile.