American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The outbreak of the Hantavirus illness in the early summer of 1993 brought more than death to the Navajo people of the Four Corners area of the Southwest. It also brought the media, and with the media came stereotypical reporting and invasions of privacy. From ”Navajo Flu” to “Four Corners Illness” to Hantavirus-Associated Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome, the national news media reported on the viral infection that by summer’s end had appeared in ten states and taken more than two dozen lives. Now, almost a year later, it is clear that the media’s experience in covering the initial outbreak of the disease in the Southwest can be instructive, not only as a historical case study but also as a guide to current and future issues of coverage. For what began as a local-and then regional-story, has assumed national proportions. Since the end of the first chapter of the Hantavirus story, the number of confirmed cases nationally has swelled to at least sixty, including thirty-five deaths. By the spring of 1994, only a minority of the total number of cases (twenty)and deaths (eleven)had been documented in New Mexico. Also, although at first no cases were reported east of the Mississippi River, in January 1994 a Florida man was diagnosed with the Hantavirus, and in the same month a forty-eight-year-old Indiana man died from the disease, a case confirmed by the state Department of Health. Clearly, the national media will be faced with Hantavirus stories this year and probably for years to come. One measure of this perspective occurred in October 1993 when the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed the official name of the disease from Four Corners Hantavirus to Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome.