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[Music] In 1993, on an Indian reservation in the southwestern United States, young Navajo
Indians were dying at an alarming rate. More than 20 people would die from the mysterious disease, one that health
officials had never seen before. But the Navajo Medicine men provided a critical piece of information which led
investigators around the world to a most unlikely killer. [Music] [Music] Covering 25,000 square miles of high
desert in four states, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, is a Navajo Indian reservation in an area known as
the Four Corners. It's the largest Navajo community in America with some 1,200 members of the
tribe living throughout the desert hills. The scenery brings thousands of tourists
each year, a vital source of revenue for the Navajo who have inhabited the area for centuries. But poverty is endemic
and was a fact of life for people like 19-year-old Merrill Bahi. But Mel Bahi had something that set him apart. Merl
was a very phenomenal person. But where he stood out was his running ability. And uh I think if you talk to anybody
that saw him run, you know, they would tell you that it was a gift that he had uh in running. and he loved to run.
>> Merryill Bahi was so fast he won a full scholarship to the Santa Fe Indian School, a boarding school that was miles
away from his home both physically and culturally. >> He didn't really know how to put a sheet on a bl,
you know, it was like he threw the blanket on and that was it. Said, "No, Mo, you um you put this down first." So
I I had to show him how to to make up a bed. >> Bahi slowly adjusted to his new life. He
did well in school, but the transition to life in the city was difficult until he met Florina Woody.
>> Something magical happened. He met another Navajo girl at a PBLO school and they fell in love so intensely that um
the track coach decided to make Florina the manager of the track team to hand out the towels so that uh Merryill would
keep his mind on his running. >> Not long afterwards, they had a son Maurice and planned to get married. But
shortly after the baby was born, Florina woke up one morning with what she thought was the flu.
>> She was all cold. She kept, you know, having these chills and it was it was something like you're
getting a cold or getting sick from a a common cold. >> Her lungs were a white out, meaning they
were just solid. They should usually be dark from from the air, and they obviously had something in there, fluid
in there. >> Doctors raced to find out what was wrong. They administered oxygen to help
Fina breathe, but she went into shock. I saw um one of the nurses coming out of her room all disturbed and she was
crying and and I knew there that something was happening. >> None of the standard procedures worked
and Florina's heart stopped beating. The pressure on her lungs was simply too much for her body to bear. The cause of
death, acute respiratory failure. Florina Woody died on Mother's Day. She was just 21 years old.
>> When they told us that she was gone, then they allowed us to go into her room. I just couldn't believe that my my
baby is gone. I didn't want to leave her. I just want to hang out there right there.
Doctors had no idea what had caused Florina's sudden death, and they feared that whatever killed Florina Woody might
be contagious. Florina's death was a particularly cruel blow to Meil Bahi. The mother of his
infant son was dead. As Bahi prepared Flerina's funeral, he too started to develop similar symptoms.
Merryill Bahi was beside himself. He wasn't feeling well, but it didn't occur to him that uh that it
could possibly be the same thing that affected Florina. >> Merryill's physical condition quickly
deteriorated, and he was rushed to the Crown Point Hospital, the same hospital that treated Florina.
After an initial consultation, Merrill did not want to be treated where Florina died. So his family drove him to the
Indian Medical Center in Gallup, an hour away. Shortly before arrival, Merrill lost consciousness.
As doctors rushed him into the emergency room, he died. The cause of death, acute
respiratory failure. Merryill Bahi was only 19 years old. Ironically, Merryill died during
Florina's funeral service, which was taking place directly across the street from the hospital. The funeral was going
on and there we had a meeting with our medical investigator and Merryill's family were coming in for Flo's funeral
and they were told there and everything just started happening here and there and and that's when I went to shock.
Health authorities had no explanation for what killed the young couple. The only way they could determine the cause
was to perform a complete autopsy. But autopsies are not permitted in the Navajo community.
>> It's forbidden in among traditional Napos to have autopsies done and the Navajo tribal government can forbid that
if they want to. And I don't think the government people really understood that that we have that sovereign power to do
that even if it's a medical emergency. But with her daughter and future son-in-law dead, Beta Beay wanted
answers. She took the unusual step of defying tradition and the tribal elders by giving doctors permission to perform
the autopsies. The autopsy findings took on a new importance when Merrill and Florina's
infant child, Maurice, also fell ill. He was rushed to the hospital and quarantined.
>> What is it? Where did it come from or what is it? Is it going to is it going to be here or how? You know, I asked I
had that I had those questions and I wanted to find out. As authorities awaited the autopsy
results, the disease continued its deadly rampage. Within a week of Florina and Merrill's
deaths, the number of dead had risen to six, and each day more people were being
hospitalized with symptoms. New Mexico officials feared they had an epidemic on their hands and panic
gripped the region. We were getting calls from concerned citizens and concerned physicians and concerned
school administrators and concerned everybody. Uh and that always will happen when something as dramatic as
this and as frightening as this is occurring and when you do really don't have any good answers.
>> The autopsies on Meil Bahi and Florina Woody answered few questions. The mystery illness could not be identified
and until it was more people were destined to die. >> Doctors in the Four Corners area are on
alert to a deadly respiratory illness. >> May 1993, Navajo radio stations in the Four
Corners Indian Reservation broadcast an alert. Young Navajo were dying at an alarming rate and new cases were being
reported every day. So little was known that health officials were not able to tell listeners what precautions to take
against the disease. >> It was frightening for people who came down with a fever and cough and headache
at the time. As a physician, we're sending people home who we had to accept the possibility that they could drop
dead within hours of leaving the hospital. >> The outbreak was now national news. And
since it appeared that only Navajo were affected, it was dubbed the Navajo flu. >> There was pandemonium.
It's impossible to keep a string of deaths like this a secret for very long. One possibility was bubanic plague. The
dreaded black death that killed millions during the Middle Ages and still strikes
more than a thousand people worldwide every year. Plague symptoms, particularly the high fever, muscle
pain, and fluid buildup bore similarities to the four corners disease. bubanic plague still crops up
in New Mexico from time to time and so the state is very well equipped to do that test and um much to the to the uh
chagrin of the investigators um the test was negative. It it was shagrin because
they still didn't know what had killed this young couple. Another possibility was pneumonic plague, a highly
contagious disease. It attacks the lungs and kills quickly, which is what happened to the four corners victims.
Since it could be treated with large doses of antibiotics, doctors actually hoped that this was what they'd find.
But the autopsies turned up something different. The capillaries of the victims had collapsed, leaving the lungs
wet like large sponges. This was not consistent with pneumonic plague and it did not resemble anything medical
investigators had ever seen before >> and it was very puzzling and it was it was frustrating because you felt like
how come we're not smart enough to figure this out? You know, this shouldn't be that hard. So, I haven't
had I haven't had that many cases at one time that I didn't understand. >> Local health officials called in the
Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. The CDC special pathogens team was sent in to look for possible causes.
And they started their investigation in the trailer that Mel Bahi and Florina Woody once called home.
>> We had no idea what this was. We didn't know whether it was contagious. We didn't know whether working with the
tissues was going to be dangerous. We didn't know whether you could get this uh in the laboratory or from somebody
outside in the field. >> The outbreak was considered a biosafety level four hazard, the most lethal
designation. Dressed in specially designed suits to keep them free from any contagion, CDC
specialists searched the trailer and the surrounding area. They wore something like that. You know the astronauts that
they're they're sending off to outer space. You know how they dress? They were dressed like that when they came to
our place. And that was even scarier. They There was fear. They they scared us. While the medical community turned to
their scientific experts, the Navajo turned to their own specialists, the traditional healers or medicine men who
were responsible for the health of the reservation. They said they were familiar with this disease and that it
had struck before. They were saying that uh this outbreak had occurred in the century in uh 1933 and 1918 when uh it
was preceded by 2 years of plentiful rains and heavy winter snows in the mountains.
The tribal healer said the heavy rains had resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of mice on the reservation.
And they suspected there was some connection between the large number of mice and these deaths, but they could
not say what it was. There was an old Nashville saying that I learned as a child that uh if a mouse ever runs over
your clothing, you should burn it. And uh nobody ever knew what that old saying meant. Records indicated that there were
heavy rains in 1991 and 92, the two years preceding the current outbreak. But health officials could not find any
link between the rain, the growing deer mice population, and the outbreak. Meanwhile, in what's known as the
maximum containment section of the CDC labs, an area reserved for the study of the world's most dangerous germs and
viruses, investigators performed an ELISA test or enzyme linked imunosorbent assay on the tissue samples from the
victims. When a disease strikes, the body reacts by producing antibodies which are unique to that disease. The
ELISA test can isolate those antibodies in order to compare them to the thousands of samples in the CDC files.
Comparison after comparison was made and no matches were found until the investigation took an unexpected turn,
one that would take medical detectives back in time and halfway around the world.
[Music] Within six weeks of Florina Woody and Melbah's deaths, more than 12 other
young people had also died of the same mysterious disease. Investigators got a break in the case when a tourist from
Iceland after visiting the reservation developed symptoms of the disease. Investigators now realized the outbreak
was probably environmental and was not confined to the Navajo. >> Unfortunately,
somebody um sort of identified this as a Navajo disease, which it very obviously
wasn't because we were seeing there there were other cases occurring in in non-Navajos, but but that that was
particularly offensive, I think, to people. When CDC investigators compared the antibodies from the outbreak victims
to those in their vast file of known diseases, they made a surprising discovery. The only sample that was in
any way similar was one that was 40 years old. It was a sample taken from a soldier stationed in Korea in 1950.
During the Korean War, more than 3,000 troops developed high fevers and kidney failure. About 400 died. Doctors called
it Havirus because it was traced back to Korea's Honan River. That region was home to large numbers of striped field
mice. Feces and urine from infected mice carried the virus. When it dried out, it
became airborne and was then inhaled by the soldiers. From there, the virus attacked the kidneys. But investigators
were uncertain whether this was the same as the four corners virus. There had never been a haunt virus reported in
North America. And the four corners disease attacked the lungs, not the kidneys. I had no idea what Honda virus
was and looked looked in, you know, my textbook which had a very short section on it. Uh, and of course it describes a
disease that occurs in Asia which which sounded nothing like what we were dealing with.
>> Was this the same disease? And if so, how did it travel from Korea to a North
American Indian reservation? CDC investigators then remembered what they'd been told by the Navajo
traditional healers. >> The medicine men had said it when a remarkably wet winter was followed by
the masting of the the pinion trees. When when the pinion trees put out um an abundant supply of nuts, the rodent
populations in the state began to to grow. And when that happened, young Navajo died.
>> Investigators caught and tested deer mice from the Four Corners area. They found the mice were shedding a virus
with the same DNA profile as the virus found in Florina Woody and Melbi. But the DNA profile of this virus was
not identical to the Korean H virus. Although the DNA profiles were similar, the strain from the Navajo reservation
was a new one unique to North America. >> What we found when we did the comparison
was that this was a new honor. That is the sequence was far enough from any other known hanavirus that we were
convinced that it was a new virus. It wasn't just a minor variant on one of the old viruses. CDC scientists and
Navajo medicine men suspected the North American HANA virus had been around for centuries, but since the cases were so
isolated, it had always been misdiagnosed. The Navajo made up a greater percentage
of the victims only because they lived in more rural areas with large deer mice populations.
In the two years before the outbreak, heavy spring rains created a bumper crop of pinion nuts, a rich source of food
for the growing mice population. Authorities believe that Merryill Bahi and Florina Woody inhaled the dried
urine and fecal matter from the infected deer mice when they were house cleaning
or digging in their garden. In my heart, I think it's it was God's will that this is what was supposed to happen to
both of them and they were meant for each other and they were meant to go together.
>> Health officials recommend that masks and gloves be worn when cleaning rodent
droppings and that people do everything possible to keep rodents out of their homes. They also point out that the four
corners outbreak was identified through the wisdom of the Navajo medicine men and the scientists who were smart enough
to listen. >> We were discovering an old disease that the traditional healers had discovered
long ago. And that was the I think to me that was uh the most exciting thing about this whole investigation. The
Navajo, using an entirely different approach, looking at the balance of nature, were able to identify factors
that led them to the same conclusion that um when rodent populations um explode the way they did in in the
Four Corners in the spring of 1993, young Navajo died. These two very different sets of people
set out on very different paths and arrived in the same place. [Music] Why? [Music]
Heat. Are you ready? [Music]

Season 4 Episode 12 | Young Navajos in the Southwest were dying at an alarming rate. The tribe's medicine men provided investigators with a critical clue...which would lead halfway around the world to a most unlikely killer.

Brief Summary

In 1993, a mysterious illness killed young Navajo, leading to a CDC investigation that uncovered a new strain of hantavirus linked to deer mice.

Key points

Tragic Loss. Florina Woody's sudden death at 21 leaves a community in shock.
A Race Against Time. As the death toll rises, health officials scramble to find answers.
The Mysterious Illness. In 1993, a mysterious disease struck young Navajos, leading to alarming death rates.
A New Virus Emerges. Investigators discover a new strain of hantavirus linked to the outbreak.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Merryill Bahi was so fast he won a full scholarship.

Highlighting Bahi's exceptional running talent.

2:16WatchOct 16, 2025

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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