Health Watch: Rabies Vaccine

ATLANTA - Officials with the Cobb-Douglas Health Department said Tuesday that three people attacked this weekend by a fox have begun treatment for rabies.

This is the second fox attack in the last two weeks in metro Atlanta. A vaccine made in Georgia may help slow the spread of rabies in wild animals.

Any mammal can get rabies and dogs, cats and even ferrets can be protected with a yearly rabies shot.

But how do you vaccinate a wild animal like a raccoon?

A Duluth, Georgia company thinks it's found a way with a vaccine animals can eat.

Michael Ellis has a lot on his hands with a 9-week-old coyote pup and a baby bat.

"These guys are the best mosquito exterminators around," said Ellis.

Ellis also has eight red fox kits and an orphaned, spotted skunk, so young its eyes haven't yet opened.

Ellis, the founder and director of the Atlanta Wild Animal Rescue Effort, or AWARE says all of the animals share one thing in common.

"I don't know of an animal in North America that isn't born with an instinctive fear of man, except for perhaps grizzly bears, alligators," said Ellis. "The rest of the animals, in 22 years of doing this, are instinctively afraid of us and all you need to do is clap your hands and yell at them and they run."

That wasn't the case with a fox in Kennesaw Sunday. Eric Batista said the fox, believed to be rabid, attacked him, two others and a dog before being killed by a police officer.

The attack is eerily similar to another unprovoked attack two weeks ago in Fayette County, in which a rabid fox bit Walter Wilson and another man.

Ellis said sometimes it's obvious an animal is rabid, but sometimes it's not, because rabies displays itself in many different ways.

"The majority of the time, what we see is aggression on the part of the animal, growling, erratic movements," said Ellis.

Ellis said just because a wild animal doesn't run away from you doesn't mean it has rabies.

"It's perfectly normal for a coyote to walk within 30 feet of a person and never even turn its head and look at them. Or a fox to lay down in your yard, 20 feet from your deck and enjoy sunning itself," Ellis said.

The raccoons at the Yellow River Game Ranch are rabies-free, but more than 90 percent of the virus, which is spread through infected saliva, is found in wild animals.

In Georgia, the most common carriers of virus are raccoons followed by foxes, skunks, coyotes, bobcats and bats.

But how do you vaccinate wild animals?

Dr. Myron Downs, president of the Georgia Veterinary Medical Association says you can vaccinate wild animals with oral rabies vaccine bait.

The vaccine is made in Duluth by Merial. In Georgia, the vaccine is used to immunize wild raccoons.

In Texas, health officials have been using the bait to control rabies outbreaks in coyotes, by loading it onto planes and dropping the bait into remote rabies hotspots. The animals are drawn to the vaccine's fishy smell.

"Instead of people running out into the woods trying to vaccinate them, they're going to in a mass way drop these things into their habit. So they can find it, they can ingest it, they can get the virus and they can start to get immunity," said Dr. Downs.

For dogs and cats, a yearly rabies shot will protect them.

"We need to not provide any food sources whatsoever, in terms of garbage or feeding pets outside. We need to not allow our pets to roam free," said Ellis.

Ellis said the best the way to prevent problems with animals is to let what's wild, stay wild.

Related Links:

• You can learn more about AWARE and its work with wild animals by going to the Atlanta Wild Animal Rescue Effort’s website: www.awareone.org .
• And you can learn more about the Raboral oral rabies vaccine by going to www.raboral.com .