Gene Hackman and wife found dead

This story just keeps getting sadder each day...

What a sad way to go. They should have been in a nursing home. But I suspect most elderly people prefer to die in their own homes.

They should have had a nurse or caregiver coming in every day. Seems she was doing all the work herself. She must have been really sick at the end and probably should have been hospitalized. Sad.

I guess if it were me, I'd feel uncomfortable having some stranger come and visit me every day just to make sure I'm still alive. Hantavirus - such a strange virus. According to Google you get that from rodents.

Just awful.

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It’s very likely he was unaware of his wife’s death, if reports are true about his dementia.

Echoing what’s been said already. Just a sad, awful ending.

Gene Hackman and wife's causes of death revealed

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This is a silly statement to make. You can be 95 and at least be healthy enough to generally handle day-to-day tasks. Not every 95-year-old is the same. Gene sadly wasn't one of them though, considering he had Alzheimer's.

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Just reading about hantavirus. Starts like a flu but the rare cases cause fluid around the lungs and a person a die rather quickly.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/07/healt...ome/index.html

She can't have been ALL that ill when she collected the dog from the vets, and it looks like that was 2 days before she died.
Poor lady. Sounds like an incredibly rare disease.

Ridiculously rare.

Rare, but not unknown. It's one of many pathogens that lurk around the edge of our world that are waiting for the chance to reduce the human population by rapidly infecting people who are unprepared, immunologically speaking. That's most of us.

I was working in the communicable disease world when Legionnaire's Disease hit the news. Subsequent studies showed that it had been around for a while, but never killed a bunch of people all at once in one hotel. Now, we know what it is.

Hanta has been in Asia for a long time. For us, it's just a matter of when, not if, it gets here.

Ironically I just got through watching Outbreak (1995) and noticed this towards the start of the movie:

at first i thought there wife suicide and the dog starved to death :/

It doesn't spread from person to person and is specific to deer mouse in origin. Unlikely to become a major problem. I would worry more about the measles returning.

I was reading something yesterday about this and its just so sad to me. Seems like she probably died before him and maybe he didn't even know. I can't help but think that maybe he found her a week later and maybe that's why he died. Jesus... just sad.

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It may be the case that instances of Hantavirus are underreported. Asserting this positively would take us in the tortuous territory of proving the negative (finding evidence that we don't have evidence). If it is your position that cases are underreported, I would ask for this proof. Without it, our best warranted conclusion, at least for now, is that literally only a handful of Americans (a nation with a third of a billion people) die from this a year. If on the other hand, your stance is that cases may be underreported, I agree, however, the best warranted assertion is still that deaths from this disease are vanishingly rare. You're more likely to be killed by a serial killer, your lawnmower, or a stairwell.

That stated, it certainly is no good to get it and if you do, it can very well kill you. You should be careful around mouse poop in the same way that you're generally cautious around stairwells, lawnmowers, and MoFo users. That stated, we should not elevate our subjective sense of threat and unwellness relative to conspicuous anecdotes (odds are, you will die of heart disease, liver disease, or cancer).

It's cool that you have some "inside baseball" here and that adds some plausibility which should make us pause. That stated, the probability still appears to be highly negligible.

I love this scene from the Last of Us, a great set-up for a "What if?"

A pharmacist friend of mine says one of the dogs probably came into contact with the mouse dung ( dogs will sniff anything) and she got the virus from petting or playing with the dog.

A few folks have said they should have been in a nursing home. But his wife was only 63 (my age, ya whippersnappers!), and I'm guessing that she was taking care of him. Why not keep the man at home as long as possible instead of dumping him in a nursing home, even a good one? This just sounds more and more like a horrid turn of events in that his wife/caregiver died, leaving him unable to care for himself and leaving the dog uncared for in the crate.

Sure, in a nursing home things might have been different, but the lack of a nursing home in this case doesn't sound negligent with a wife who was only 63.

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A little more information in this article:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-...5c38d822d&ei=9

One line in particular caught my eye: "Dogs don’t get the disease, and the strain found in the U.S. can’t spread from human to human, she said."