One was hantavirus—which is actually a group of viruses, long known to virologists following outbreaks in Russia, Scandinavia, and elsewhere but newly conspicuous since a year earlier, 1993, when a new hantavirus emerged dramatically and killed ten people around the Four Corners area of the American Southwest. Australia is justifiably wary of exotic diseases invading its borders, and hantavirus in the country would be even worse news (except for horses) than African horse sickness.
