CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Among Vacationers, Anxiety Is Catching : Mammoth Lakes has had its share of misfortunes. Now, tourists and residents are worried about deadly hantavirus.

MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. — The buzz around the visitors bureau Wednesday was a little off-key, a bit insistent. One tourist would ask how to catch trout, but the next would wonder how not to catch hantavirus.

In the days since Jeanne Messier, a UC San Diego graduate student doing research at the Valentine Ecological Reserve here, died of a flu-like illness caused by hantavirus, the local ranger station of the U.S. Forest Service has received more than 500 phone calls from concerned visitors and prospective vacationers.

Anxious holiday planners from Southern California also have been ringing up Town Hall, wondering if it’s safe to visit. Around town, the hum of whispered rumors is hard to miss.

“We just came from Bishop, where they had a campground closed because of the bubonic plague, and now this,” said Tommy Woolf, a Bakersfield machinist on holiday with his family, setting up camp at Lake Mary. “It seems like a dangerous thing, doesn’t it?”

The hantavirus is transmitted to humans when they breathe the dried-out excrement of deer mice after it has turned to dust and dispersed into the air. That’s about the only concrete information on how hantavirus infection works.

With information so sketchy, health officials here have decided not to impose quarantines or travel restrictions. They instead have instructed vacationers and residents to avoid rodents and to carefully dispose of any droppings they encounter.

Still, it’s one thing to tell visitors to be wary of small animals and quite another for tourists to feel safe from something that they cannot see.

“If it’s transmitted in the air, that’s kind of spooky,” said Carl Miller, an outdoorsman from Los Angeles here for a few days of fishing. “I would be a little more cautious now, especially if the wind is blowing.”

Hantavirus was the first thing Joan Williams of Bel-Air asked her hosts about when she arrived this week for a visit. She’d refused to stop in Albuquerque on a trip earlier this year because of a hantavirus outbreak in New Mexico and the Four Corners region, where at least 15 people have died.

“I said when I got here, ‘I hope it’s not going to be another AIDS,’ ” Williams said. “Maybe I’m silly, but you’re breathing this. With AIDS, it’s a body-contact thing. This is scary.”

Local physicians are seeing more patients than usual filing in with the regular flu, wary that they might have the mystery illness. One internist even had a patient call, wondering if a pet mouse could transmit the disease. The answer, he said, is probably not.

In Mammoth Lakes, a town trying to get back on its feet after a decade of difficulty, it doesn’t take much to make people flinch. Generally snake-bit and currently mouse-bit, this vacation village--commonly considered the Southland’s skiing suburb--is no novice when it comes to hard times.

There was the volcano warning in 1982, earthquake swarms a year later, a seven-year drought that just ended and a recession that hasn’t, and the Rainbow Fire that burned through the surrounding forest and threatened the town during the height of last summer. Last winter a small but deadly avalanche hit the outskirts of town, and propane explosions triggered by heavy snow destroyed condos.

“Some people may not come” because of the virus, said Cindy Henry, owner of Slocums and Gringo’s restaurants here and a 14-year resident. “But I’m not a doomsayer. I’m not going to throw up my hands and say, ‘There goes summer.’ . . . We have this survivor, pioneering spirit here. You just go to Plan B.”

Louise Barrett, owner of the Pokonobe Marina and Lodge on Lake Mary, has been in Mammoth Lakes since 1957. Her marina was closed for eight days by last summer’s fire. “And now it looks like we may have something else,” she said, decked out in pearls and a sun hat, filing her nails in the summer sun and not looking the least bit surprised. “If we should prove to have many cases of this hantavirus, it might close Mammoth for the summer. That would be a terrible thing.”

For now, based on “scientific data and doing the right thing,” the area is open and unrestricted, said Dr. Jack Bertman, Mono County’s health officer. With only a single, possibly isolated case of hantavirus infection, no further action is warranted, he said.

“We don’t like to tell anyone they can’t come to the beautiful Sierra,” Bertman said. “But we closed Sherwin Creek campground for several weeks in July for bubonic plague. . . . We’re not intimidated in protecting the public health.”

In addition to staying away from rodents, health officials suggest that mouse excrement found in campsites or homes not be swept up or vacuumed. Instead, contaminated areas and dead animals should be soaked in disinfectant, and handlers should wear rubber gloves. Dead animals should then be double-bagged in plastic and buried.

Bob Peterson, a Murietta maintenance electrician fly-fishing at Coldwater Campground, wasn’t too worried about the virus.

“I already take precautions,” he said. “I don’t let the rodents run around in the food. I teach my kids that they’re cute, but they’re dirty and cause disease.”

He paused, slapped at an insect on his arm and continued. “It’s a good thing the virus isn’t transmitted by mosquito.”

Health Concerns

Tourists in Mammoth Lakes are skittish about hantavirus, but health officials say that taking basic precautions around rodents should reduce any risk. A graduate student working at Valentine Ecological Reserve died last week of hantavirus infection.