State Department of Health officials are examining what may be the first case of potentially deadly hantavirus found in New York this year, believed to have resulted from a mouse bite in an Adirondack High Peaks lean-to in August.

"The department is looking into the issue," DOH spokesman Jeffrey Hammond said.

Additionally, medical personnel at Stony Brook University Hospital have tentatively set a news conference Friday with the Long Island resident who contracted and then recovered from the viral illness, which is typically transmitted by inhaling dust or particles tainted with rodent droppings.

"They confirmed it today," said Michael Vaughan, 72, of Stony Brook, who came down with the illness in September and was hospitalized in intensive care for four days. He was referring to blood tests that had been sent out to verify the existence of the virus.

A research geophysicist at Stony Brook University, Vaughan was camping in a lean-to, a primitive three-sided wood-hewn shelter, in the High Peaks wilderness not far from mounts Skylight and Gray.

While sleeping with his arms and hands outside of a sleeping bag, a mouse bit his finger during the night.

"It wasn't a mean bite," he said, adding he believed the mammal was foraging and may have smelled some food residue under his fingernails. "People don't normally get bitten by mice," he said.

He didn't think much of it until September when he became ill and doctors said they believed it was hantavirus, which can take a month or more to incubate.

With no anti-viral medications for the illness, treatment consisted of "good nursing care" and plenty of hydration in the hospital, Vaughan said.

Word of the virus emerged earlier in the week when Vaughan described his experience on an Internet forum about the High Peaks.

He was back in the Adirondacks over the Columbus Day weekend and other hikers there said he should tell forest rangers about his illness, so he did.

"A lot of people said, tell DEC," Vaughan remarked, referring to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

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The state Department of Health listed one verified case of hantavirus in 2011, in Suffolk County, Long Island.

News of the Adirondack case follows reports that at least nine visitors to California's Yosemite Park contracted the virus during the summer. At least three of the victims died.

Researchers in California were trying to determine if this was the same strain of rodent-borne virus first discovered in the United States in 1993 in the Four Corners region of the Southwest.

At the time, Navajo elders in the Southwest believed the outbreak came after there was an abundance of pine nuts that year, which caused the mouse population to spike.

Vaughan said his wife, who was with him in the lean-to, swept out the dwelling during their August visit. There have been reports, though, that this year's unusually dry summer led to less food for mice, meaning they were more apt to venture into places that might contain food such as lean-tos.

Named for the Hantan River in South Korea where it was first identified, hantavirus can kill as many as one out of three people who have their lungs infected.