[1] Residents living in the Four Corners region, which encompasses parts of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, began to experience a mysterious illness in the spring of 1993.
[1] The illness was originally nicknamed "Sin Nombre," after a New Mexican canyon where Spanish settlers massacred Native Americans during the colonial era.
[1] Terry Yates, a professor at the University of New Mexico, joined an interdisciplinary research team charged with finding the source of the mysterious illness by the National Science Foundation.
[1] Yates found that the hantavirus was carried by the deer mouse, a species which had a higher than usual population in early 1993 due to unusually wet weather in the region.
[1] The National Science Foundation named Yates' discovery of the cause of the hantavirus as one of the top fifty projected funded by the NSF which had the greatest impact on peoples' lives.