CBS News97%
Man who survived hantavirus, but lost mom and sister, describes experience 92%
5/9/2026, 12:24:52 AM
BS Summary: This video contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Appeal to Emotion, and Negativity Bias, with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 44.6% saturation with 339 hits. Analysis detected 2,502 faulty-reasoning hits from 760 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 86.8% and a BS Rank of 92% (1,466 of 16,813 videos). This video is worse (more manipulative) than 91.30% of the video peer group.
It's been 24 years, but Gilbert Zermeno remembers losing both his mother and sister who lived in Texas to haunt virus.
very well. Turns out after he'd cleaned their house, he was exposed to rodent droppings and became infected.
He spent several days in a Phoenix hospital and was released only to go back.
Z, as his loved ones call him, was able to fight and see his daughter again.
After Zmeno recovered in 2002, he spoke to CBS Evening News about his experience.
>> It's Arizona. It's over 100 degrees outside and I'm I'm freezing. They didn't know what they were dealing with. We knew more than they did.
>> Bill Burton Zermeno joins us now. He's an acclaimed photojournalist for a family, the CBS station in Phoenix. I'm also lucky enough to call him a friend.
Hey. >> Hi, baby. Happy Mother's Day.
>> Thank you. So, back to the topic. 2002, the worst year of your life. You lost your mom, you lost your sister, you lost your dad in something unrelated.
How are you feeling with honorus being in the news again?
Now, I imagine I got the same feeling that every person who's ever contracted Han virus and still deals with the effects afterwards of it much worse than I have feel and felt when we heard about the story.
Um, it takes you back and it's no less painful now than it was back then. Uh, it's hard, not going to lie.
One of the things that, uh, I started realizing and I had a conversation with my daughter about doing interviews on this.
She said, 'You know, Dad, there's a lot of misinformation out there and social media influencers that are trying to panic the general public uh into uh freaking out when you hear the word virus attached to anything.'
But I'm here to just tell people, look, you need to do some research on this because it's not as scary as CO was.
And I had CO, too, and survived that. So that's kind of why I'm here to talk to you and to the general public about my experience.
>> And so we're going to get into more of the misinformation and what you want people to know.
But at the time it was so rare. You had flu-l like symptoms, aches, pains.
The hospital actually sent you home because they hadn't seen evidence of haunt virus. But and your mom and your sister were also misdiagnosed.
They they uh it was said that they died of sepsis, but it was haunt virus. So, how did the rarity of this at the time complicate your treatment and diagnosis?
>> I kept testing negative for it. Um, and they kept taking blood and in the first time I was in the hospital, a doctor came in and said, "I've got I I think it's 99.9% sure that you do not have the haunt virus."
And we thankfully I had a really great support system.
my uh my wife and my sister-in-laws and one of them was in the medical community uh did a lot of research and and came with information that they shared with the medical professionals that were taking care of me and they stayed on it. So, I had a really good group of medical advocates by my side and that were helping me.
>> and I mean you you did pull through, but
at one point you had actually like made your peace with God in case because it was looking that bad at that point and you were scared.
But that said, you are one of these rare people who have had you've survived haunt virus.
You've survived CO and and exactly what you said echoes what our own Dr. Selene Gaer has said, which is, you know, this isn't co it it doesn't spread as easily. We've known about haunt virus for decades. We didn't know about CO at the time.
What else do you want people to take away from hearing your story?
>> Well, I want them to a be informed, listen to your medical professionals, and have a plan in in the event that you do feel that you were exposed to the haunt virus or to someone who had the haunt virus.
The likelihood of you haunt virus. The likelihood of you catching it from a person to person is minuscule.
>> Thanks for sharing your story, Z. Appreciate you.
Analysis
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