Wildlife Officials Prepare Massive Rabies Vaccine Air Drop

Fish-flavored ketchup packets will start falling from the sky next week as federal wildlife officials continue a seven-year campaign against raccoon strain rabies.

From Oct. 5-9, planes flown by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service will drop hundreds of thousands of special packets containing an oral rabies vaccine over parts of Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee.

“It looks like a white ketchup packet,” APHIS spokeswoman Brie Lang said of the vaccine packets, which are coated in fish meal to make them attractive to their targets. “The raccoons smell the fish meal, bite into the packet and swallow the vaccine.”

Prior to the air distribution, APHIS personnel will spread the vaccine packets by hand in the region’s more developed areas, where dropping them from planes might not be the best of ideas. This hand-distribution will occur from Oct. 1-5, Lang said.

The disease

Rabies is a virus that can infect and kill mammals, including pets and human beings, by destroying the central nervous system. The disease has several types, or strains, that are spread through saliva and bites. Lang said the eastern U.S. is home to three strains: raccoon strain rabies, skunk strain rabies and bat strain rabies.

Raccoon strain rabies is the most common type found in the Mountain Empire, Lang said. It was present in 78 of the 145 rabid animals found in Northeast Tennessee’s Carter, Greene, Hawkins, Johnson, Sullivan, Unicoi and Washington counties over the past five years, according to records obtained from the Tennessee Department of Health.

A similar pattern exists in Southwest Virginia. Since 2005, the Virginia Department of Health reports, 61 of the 140 rabid animals found in Bristol and Grayson, Russell, Scott, Smyth, Tazewell, Washington, and Wythe counties were raccoons.

But that doesn’t mean all 61 raccoons had raccoon strain rabies, because the health department doesn’t record information about the particular strain found in rabid animals. Nor does it mean those 61 animals were the only creatures in Southwest Virginia diagnosed with raccoon strain rabies.

While the raccoon strain is prevalent in the eastern U.S., it is almost non-existent in areas west of the Appalachian Mountains, which serve as a barrier slowing the raccoon population’s migration west.

Lang said her agency wants to keep things that way, which is why wildlife officials have drawn a figurative “line in the sand” from Maine to Alabama and made the 12 states it crosses part of the National Rabies Management Program.

The baits

Federal and state wildlife officials started spreading raccoon rabies vaccine pellets throughout parts of Maine and New York in 1997. Lang said Virginia and
Tennessee joined the program in 2002.

In 2008, APHIS personnel used planes based out of the Greeneville-Greene County Airport to distribute 735,198 coated sachet baits – the fish-flavored ketchup packets – in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia.

They hand distributed another 73,800 fish-meal polymer baits by driving around the region’s more developed areas and tossing the packets out the windows of their trucks. The baits contain an oral rabies vaccine packet surrounded by a hard box that is coated with fish meal.

Both the sachet and polymer baits have shown to be safe for more than 60 kinds of animals, including dogs and cats, according to APHIS’ Web site. But they can cause a pox-like infection among pregnant women and people with immunodeficiency diseases. That is why APHIS recommends that people wear gloves or use a plastic bag to handle either type of bait and wash their hands when they’re done.

The bait’s smell is another reason to take those precautions, according to the agency’s Web site, “because it may get on your skin and is often objectionable to people.”

The results

A few months after distributing the rabies vaccine pellets, APHIS personnel return to the target area to capture and test raccoons so they can measure the
program’s effectiveness. They also test raccoons that are hit by cars or captured by local animal control officers.

Lang said about 30 percent to 40 percent of the raccoons found in the Mountain Empire last year had rabies antibodies, which means they were successfully inoculated. The presence of rabies antibodies doesn’t mean a particular animal is immune to the disease, Lang said, but that they are less likely to get it, much in the same way a person who has had a flu shot is less likely to come down with the flu.

“We’re really happy with this whole effort,” said Rand Carpenter, a public health veterinarian with the Tennessee Department of Health, which works side-by-side with APHIS to spread the rabies vaccine.

Carpenter said there hasn’t been a raccoon strain rabies case reported in the central and western parts of Tennessee since the program began, which was the main goal APHIS had in mind when it started spreading the rabies vaccine across Appalachia.

He said other places west of the Appalachian Mountains have reported similar results. The baiting program also helped control a breakout of raccoon rabies that sprouted in southeastern Tennessee around Chattanooga during 2004 and 2005, Carpenter said.

“That way it’s paying off,” Carpenter said. Limiting contact with wild animals and vaccinating pets are two other ways people can stop the spread of rabies, he said.

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