A woman who nearly died after catching deadly hantavirus has shared the harrowing reality of being infected with the ‘rat virus’ – and claims it took doctors WEEKS to diagnose her.
Debbie Zipperian, from Clancy, Montana in the US, became sick in 2011 after coming into contact with rodent faeces as she performed daily chores at her ranch. In Montana, it is only deer mice that carry hantavirus.
Speaking in 2018, she explained that she inhaled spores from infected mice waste as she removed animal food bowls from an old chicken coop – and weeks later she was fighting for her life in hospital.
She said: ‘I had to be on my hands and knees, and there’s poop all along the edges, you know, everywhere.
‘And so my face was this close to it.’
Ms Zipperian told local news channel KPAX-News that she would have been exposed to the rodent droppings for no more than five minutes – but that’s all it took for the pathogen to take hold.
About a week later, she began to feel very ill, with severe neck and back pain along with problems breathing.
Her memory from this time is foggy, but she remembers visiting the hospital multiple times asking for help and being sent away with either the flu or pneumonia.
In 2018, Debbie Zipperian shared her experience of contracting hantavirus
On the third visit she was confused, scared and hallucinating, and medics finally diagnosed her as having Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS).
HPS, a complication of hantavirus, causes fluid to build up in the lungs, leading to breathing difficulties, respiratory failure, and can be deadly in around 38 percent of cases.
Ms Zipperian said her husband told her doctors had to strap her down because she was ‘hysterical like a rabid bobcat’.
‘I flatlined (died) twice, and they couldn’t get me ventilated because I was just too erratic, and they couldn’t get me sedated,’ she said.
Ms Zipperian was infected with the Sin Nombre hantavirus, which is endemic to Montana. Unlike the Andes strain which has torn through the MV Hondius, it is not transmissible from person-to-person.
Eventually, after doctors managed to overcome her thrashing and screaming and she was placed in an induced coma.
When she woke up seven days later, she was bolstered by the sight of her son, Wyatt, who gave her strength to recover, as well as thoughts of her husband who had sadly passed away by the time she shared her story.
The deer mouse is the only carrier of hantavirus in the state of Montana
There has been an outbreak of the Andes strain on the MV Hondius cruise ship
‘He needed me. And his dad was so ill, that’s all I thought, “Wyatt”,’ she said.
‘My support is my son and my family. I think you gotta have that. I feel I’m a lucky one, because I lived.’
Seven years after falling ill, Ms Zipperian said that she suffers with lasting spinal and neurological damage.
‘You have to learn everything all over again,’ she said, revealing she had to re-learn to walk and still struggled to get her thoughts together sometimes.
Earlier this week it was revealed that three people had died after a hantavirus outbreak on a luxury cruise ship sailing from Argentina to Cape Verde.
Several passengers travelling on the MV Hondius cruise ship are seriously ill after the outbreak, which new reports have linked to a bird watching excursion to a rubbish tip.
Signs of hantavirus usually appear between one and eight weeks after exposure to infected rodents and early signs include fatigue, fever, muscle aches, headaches, dizziness, chills and digestive problems.
After four to 10 days of infection, some patients will develop severe breathing difficulties, chest tightness and fluid accumulation in the lungs.
Dr Toshana Foster, Associate Professor in Molecular Virology, University of Nottingham, said symptoms are ‘often mistaken for the flu initially’.
She added: ‘In milder cases of HFRS, infected people may notice reduced urine output and back pain due kidney injury. These symptoms can then progress, in the worst cases to chest tightness, shortness of breath, dry cough and respiratory failure.’
The outbreak has brought renewed attention to hantavirus just over a year after Gene Hackman’s wife, Betsy Arakawa, died as a result of it at the couple’s home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Authorities initially believed both Hackman and Arakawa had died from carbon monoxide poisoning, but it was found that while the actor died of heart disease, his wife died from hantavirus.
The virus was first identified in South Korea in 1978 when researchers traced it back to a field mouse. Today, there are around 150,000 to 200,000 cases per year – most of which come from China.
According to the latest UK government guidance, there have been ‘very few cases’ of hantavirus recorded in Britain. No official number is noted, however the first confirmed UK infection was identified in 2012 and linked to wild rats.
In the US, around 890 cases of hantavirus were confirmed between 1993 and 2023.
The rarity of hantavirus in the UK and US is believed to be partly due to fewer rodent species capable of carrying the virus compared with parts of Asia and Europe, where multiple species act as hosts.
