> Patient Zero’ in deadly hantavirus cruise ship outbreak was Dutch ornithologist Leo Schilperoord

When the Schilperoords returned to Argentina on March 27, they visited a landfill four miles outside the city of Ushuaia.

The spot, overrun with trash, is avoided like the plague by its residents, but serves as a pilgrimage point for birdwatchers from all over the world in search of a rare creature — the white-throated caracara, nicknamed Darwin’s caracara after famed evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin, the first to collect it.

The Ushuaia landfill is where Argentinian authorities suspect the Dutch couple inhaled particles from the feces of long-tailed pygmy rice rats, which carry the feared Andes strain of the hantavirus — the only form known to transmit from human to human.



Hey ese, you don't want to go there, it's a nasty place.






What could go wrong?