More than 83,000 raccoon baits with rabies vaccinations will be set throughout Anne Arundel County to prevent any outbreak of the disease.
The county?s Department of Health?s Oral Vaccination Project will begin Sept. 5 and will have workers placing the edible baits in known raccoon feeding areas.
Raccoons may have the most confirmed cases of rabies in Maryland but two swimmers in a cove near Loch Raven Reservoir in Baltimore County were bitten by a rabid beaver.
Joseph Horman, the public health veterinarian for the Anne Arundel County Department of Health, spoke to The Examiner about the county?s rabies vaccination plan.
What is rabies and how does it affect animals and people?
Rabies is a viral disease that attacks the nervous system. It is transmitted through saliva usually by a bite. At first, the symptoms aren?t too dramatic until the disease reaches the brain and alters the mental state. They can become quite vicious and bite at things, even inanimate things. It then progresses into a “dumb” state and the animal becomes paralyzed. The animal can?t swallow, and that?s when they start foaming at the mouth.
How does the county?s vaccination program work?
The baits contain an attractant, and [the raccoons] come along and like it because it smells like fish. They bite into it, and get this liquid vaccine in their mouth and it vaccinates them against rabies.
Why raccoons? Why not beavers?
The major strain of rabies we have in Anne Arundel, in fact the entire East Coast, is the raccoon strain, which is a land animal strain and different from the bat strain.
If a beaver contracts rabies, I am willing to bet it?s the raccoon strain It will occasionally jump out and infect another land animal, but it doesn?t continue to go from that beaver.
What kind of trends in the state and Anne Arundel are we seeing in rabies cases?
It?s somewhat static in the state, but we?ve seen a decrease in Anne Arundel since we started the oral rabies vaccine program [129 in 1998 to 18 in 2006].
