Fighting Rabies And Counting Raccoon At Steele Creek Park

BRISTOL, Tenn. – Jordona Kirby tossed a handful of fish-meal-covered ketchup packets over her shoulder Thursday as she walked down a nature trail in Steele Creek Park.
The packets contain a special raccoon-strain rabies vaccine that Kirby and other biologists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services Program are using to fight a disease that’s endemic to Appalachia and the eastern United States.
Her stroll through Steele Creek was the first time since the program started in the late 1990s that the agency has spread the packets inside the Bristol city limits.
“Baiting Bristol is a great opportunity,” Kirby said Thursday, adding that the city has an extremely dense raccoon population so it is a good spot to fight rabies. “We know there are a lot of raccoons here and we want to keep them healthy.”
The program
Rabies is a virus that can infect and kill mammals, including pets and human beings, by destroying their central nervous system. The virus is spread through saliva and animal bites. The disease comes in several types or strains; three of them – raccoon-strain rabies, skunk-strain, and bat-strain rabies – are found in the eastern United States.
Raccoon-strain rabies is the most problematic because it can easily spread from one type of animal to another, said Eric Wilhelm, another Wildlife Services Program biologist who took part in Thursday’s distribution. Wilhelm said raccoon strain rabies also makes infected animals more aggressive and more likely to attack pets and human beings.
But while the disease is rampant in the eastern states, USDA spokeswoman Brie Lang said, it is almost non-existent west of the Appalachian Mountains because the mountains serve as a natural barrier blocking the raccoon population’s migration to the west.
Federal officials hope to keep things that way, Lang said, which is why, as part of the National Rabies Management Program, they’ve been spreading the vaccine packets down a figurative “line in the sand” that stretches from Maine to Alabama. The program started distributing vaccine packets by land and from the air over parts of New York and Maine in 1997, Lang said. Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee joined the effort in 2002.
Last year, program staff hand-distributed 73,800 fish-meal-polymer baits – similar to what Kirby spread through Steele Creek Park on Thursday – by driving around the region’s more urban areas and tossing them out of a car window. They also spread 735,198 coated sachet baits, which lack the hard polymer coating used on the hand-distributed baits, by dropping them from planes based out of the Greeneville-Greene County Airport.
Wilhelm said the program’s long-term goal is to slowly move the figurative “line in the sand” eastward until raccoon-strain rabies is a thing of the past. Once that’s happened, he said, the program can start working on other rabies strains.

Baiting Bristol
The vaccine distribution zone spans a 5,500-square-mile area covering parts of 19 Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee cities and counties. The area includes Kingsport, Tenn., Johnson City, Tenn., and even the Walnut Hills Community, Wilhelm said. But until this year it has never included parts of Bristol.
Wilhelm said program staff decided to add the Twin City and parts of Abingdon to the distribution area after moving its western edge five miles east. The decision also meant some areas previously included will not get any vaccine packets this year.
Spreading the vaccine packets in Bristol makes perfect sense, Kirby said, given the results of a raccoon population density study the program conducted this summer in and around Steele Creek Park.
The study yielded the capture of 79 unique raccoons and suddenly gave the Steele Creek area what Kirby said was “the highest [raccoon population density] we’ve had in Tennessee.”
Racoons like to live in wooded areas near water sources such as creeks and streams, Kirby said. They also like abandoned buildings, dumpsters and neighborhoods where people feed their pets outside.
Wildlife Services Program staff hope to target all of these areas over the next four days as they spread the raccoon baits through the region’s urban areas. All told, the group plans to distribute 7,000 fish-meal-polymer baits in Bristol, Va., and Bristol, Tenn. They plan to spread 1,500 packets in Abingdon, Wilhelm said.
They’ll do most of the distribution next week as they take their fight against raccoon strain rabies to the skies. From Oct. 5-9, Wildlife Services Program personnel plan to use their planes to spread 710,000 coated-sachet baits over the region’s less-populated areas.
“This is a hole-filling operation,” Wilhelm said of the hand distribution effort. “Obviously there are some places where we can’t drop [the vaccine pellets] from the sky.”

gmclean@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2518