Transcript of Doctor explains hantavirus after Gene Hackman and wife's death

Walk us through hantevirus, the symptoms that one has, if in fact it is normally lethal, if they're saying now that she actually died from this virus, and if you would know that you had it so badly.

Yasmin, I think what we're seeing here is exactly what hantevirus does. It's a devastating disease. It's a disease that can clip along at a certain rate, and all of a sudden within 24 to 48 hours, get very advanced, very severe, and even fatal. Like you can see in a case like this where they think she might have been out and about, and then later that evening or maybe the next day or the day after, just got so sick that she ended up, unfortunately, dying from this. Back in the mid '90s, when I was in residency and when I was in medical school in Albuquerque, that's when we got the first cases of hantavirus. At the time, we had no idea what it was. It was affecting healthy young adults. We ended up deciding at the time, it's hantavirus, which, again, can be this devastating disease. You're seeing here what it can do to you.