Brad Buckley, a 35-year-old Bend High School graduate and wildlife biologist, died from hantavirus last month in a mountain cabin in Colorado.

Now, his mother is working to spread the word about the rare disease, its causes and its symptoms.

“My goal is to prevent this from happening to somebody else that doesn’t even know about it,” said Susie Moon, Buckley’s mother.

She doesn’t know where he contracted the virus, which is carried in the urine and feces of deer mice. Buckley was a part-time contractor who had been tearing down attics and ceilings, so it could have been there, she said.

But when he and his friend went hunting a month ago, he just felt tired, Moon said.

“The only symptom he had was fatigue,” she said.

Buckley and his friend hiked to a cabin in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains on Oct. 15, and Buckley didn’t feel good through the weekend. By Monday, they had decided to get him out of the woods and to seek medical help the next day. But Buckley started getting sicker that night, Moon said.

His friend hiked to a nearby meadow where he could get phone reception and called 911, as well as some friends who had horses. He kept in touch with Buckley, who had a satellite phone. As he was walking back to the cabin, he talked to Buckley, who said he needed to get help immediately.

The friend ran back to the meadow to call for a helicopter evacuation, Moon said, and hurried to the cabin.

“By the time he got there, Brad was gone,” Moon said. “It’s just unreal to me.”

Since then, she has looked into hantavirus, calling state and county health departments and asking them to publicize the disease.

“I just want people to be warned,” she said.

Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome is uncommon — the Centers for Disease Control lists 545 recorded cases through July 2010, including 11 Oregonians and 70 Colorado residents. About 36 percent of the cases have been fatal.

Buckley moved to Bend with his family when he was in fourth grade, Moon said, and after graduating from Bend High School he studied wildlife science at Oregon State University.

“He’d always been interested in wildlife,” she said, adding that when some friends of his gathered recently, they recalled going out to the China Hat area, and watching the rabbits and chipmunks.

“Even back then, he was documenting how many there were, where they were,” she said.

His job as a wildlife biologist took him across the country, and for the past several years Buckley had been working to help reintroduce lynx to Colorado, she said.

He was an avid outdoorsman, and loved to telemark ski, canoe, kayak, climb, hunt and fish, she said, as well as dance, and play and coach soccer.

“Anything outdoors, he loved to do,” Moon said.

Flu-like symptoms

Hantavirus affects the lungs and the heart, said David Dedrick, a pulmonologist and medical director at the High Desert Sleep Center, who saw cases of hantavirus when he was in New Mexico during an outbreak in the 1990s.

“That’s just about as sick as you can possibly get,” he said.

Membranes in the lungs usually keep blood flowing on one side and air on the other, but the virus cracks open the membranes, he said. Plasma fills the lungs, and the patient goes into heart failure.

“The virus just basically trashes everything within your body,” Dedrick said. “It makes the floodgates of your lungs open wide.”

The symptoms start out seeming like the flu, he said — people get achy joints, a fever and feel bad. But they soon start feeling breathless, and their blood pressure drops.

“It’s a really rapid progression,” Dedrick said, noting that people can go from feeling sick to having severe symptoms within 12 hours to two days.

And it can be worse in younger people, he said, since it can set off an immune response that is stronger in healthier individuals.

“What was very sobering was, despite every resource in our hands, physicians and therapists, we still lost a lot of them,” Dedrick said.

Although the symptoms start out flu-like, people should seek medical help if they start to feel breathless, he said.

“If you feel breathless, you need to go to a doctor,” he said.

Although the chances are very slim that it is hantavirus, it could also be a sign of pneumonia, which also needs attention, Dedrick said.

The hantavirus is spread through rodent droppings and urine, frequently when people sweep up or kick up the droppings and make the virus particles airborne, then inhale the virus.

To help prevent hantavirus infections, people should work to keep rodents away from their homes, workplaces and campsites, according to the CDC.

If they do see rodent droppings or nests, they should not try to sweep them up or vacuum the area. Instead, they should wear protective gloves and wet the area with disinfectant or a detergent such as a bleach solution, let it sit, use a damp rag or towel to pick up the droppings, and then mop the area.

Local cases

Although cases in Oregon are very rare, hantavirus has affected some locally in recent years.

In 2006, a 22-year-old La Pine man died from complications related to hantavirus.

And in July 2009, Ethan Lindsey, then 31, contracted the disease.

Lindsey, who was a Bend-based Oregon Public Broadcasting correspondent and is now a producer of American Public Media’s Marketplace, said he doesn’t know where he caught it — he had been out reporting in Eastern Oregon cabins, but had also been in Montana earlier.

Several days after running a 5K on July Fourth, he started to feel tired.

“Wednesday, I went to see my doctor, he tested for H1N1 and pneumonia, and it all came up negative,” Lindsey said — but doctors didn’t think of the rare hantavirus.

Lindsey was sent home, but later that day he checked in to the emergency room, devoid of energy, he said.

“Thursday afternoon, the doctor basically came to me and said we don’t know what you have, but you’re crashing now, and we probably have to put you in a medically induced coma,” Lindsey said.

Doctors put him on a respirator, and he was in a coma for several days — only when he was recovering did the doctors determine that he had hantavirus.

“Because I got there that early, they were able to treat it early enough,” Lindsey said.

And, like others who survive hantavirus infections, Lindsey recovered completely — he ran a marathon two weeks ago.

He said the experience made him realize that even when the numbers for a disease like hantavirus are small, it still affects people.

“It’s not just a statistic, it happens to somebody,” Lindsey said.