NEW ORLEANS — The U.S. Department of Agriculture has begun scattering millions of packets of oral rabies vaccine from helicopters and planes over 13 states from Maine to Alabama.
The major aim is to keep raccoons from spreading their strain of the deadly virus to states where it hasn’t been found or isn’t widespread, said field trial coordinator Jordona Kirby.
The Department of Agriculture is also continuing tests of a vaccine approved in Canada to immunize skunks as well as raccoons, said Kirby of Wildlife Services, which is part of the agriculture department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
Rabies is spread through an infected animal’s saliva, usually through bites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Thirteen people in South Carolina were considered exposed in March because they had bottle-fed or given medicine to a sick calf that turned out to have rabies, said Dr. Michael Neault, the state veterinarian.
Globally, the virus kills 60,000 people a year, most bitten by dogs, the World Health Organization states. That’s about the same number of people who get shots to prevent rabies in the U.S. after being bitten or scratched by an infected or possibly infected animal, according to the CDC.
State and local pet vaccination laws mean the virus is mostly spread by wildlife in the U.S.
The national rabies-control program started in 1997 in Texas, where coyotes were spreading the canine variant of the virus, Kirby said.
She said vaccine drops eliminated that variant in 2004. Three years later, the CDC declared the nation free of canine rabies.
That doesn’t mean unvaccinated pets are safe. Canine rabies is among more than 20 variants — seven found in terrestrial mammals and more than 13 in species of bats, said rabies- control program coordinator Richard Chipman.
A bite from an animal infected with any variant can make any other mammal sick. Scratches occasionally do so, because animals lick their paws.
A three-year program in Arizona and New Mexico eliminated a bat rabies strain in foxes, Kirby said. And Texas, with help from the Department of Agriculture, dropped 1.1 million baits along the Mexican border in January to keep coyotes from bringing the canine variant back.
Raccoons are the main rabies reservoir in 18 states along and near the East Coast and skunks in 21 others, according to 2020 data.
