Raccoons in Bristol, region being tested for rabies

A 10-pound raccoon dozed off in its cage after Erin Patrick jabbed a syringe in its back leg as part of a study she and another federal wildlife biologist were performing in Steele Creek Park.

“He’s probably been around here for a while,” Patrick said Thursday morning before she laid the unconscious animal across the back of a truck in a Broad Street parking lot and examined its teeth to see how old it was.

Patrick and her colleague, Kevin Baker, quickly clamped a metal identification tag on the raccoon’s ear, shaved its neck and drew a sample of blood from its jugular vein.

After jotting down a few notes, the duo gently set the animal back in its cage and put it next to a group of 10 other trapped raccoons that were slowly coming to and getting ready to be taken back to the park’s forest.

Rabies wildlife biologists with the USDA’s Wildlife Services Program spent last week trapping raccoons in Steele Creek Park and three other sites in Northeast Tennessee to measure the success of the agency’s battle against raccoon strain rabies.

“This is the perfect spot for it,” Patrick said, adding that her agency’s studies show that Steele Creek Park has the highest raccoon population density – 67.4 raccoons per square mile – in all of Kentucky and Tennessee combined.

The disease

Rabies is a fatal disease that attacks the central nervous system of most mammals and can cause fever, flu-like systems, a severe headache, hallucinations, depression, paralysis and over-salivation or foaming at the mouth.

The virus that causes rabies lives in the saliva of mammals – including some pets, raccoons, bats and skunks – and is transmitted when one infected animal bites another one.

Raccoon strain rabies is a type of rabies that is most commonly found in raccoons, but can affect any other animal including humans. First identified in the 1950s, this strain exists in almost every eastern state and has been slowly spreading westward.

While Virginia and West Virginia saw their first cases of raccoon strain rabies in the 1970s, the disease didn’t show up in Tennessee until the past decade because the Appalachian Mountains prevented westward movement of the raccoons that carried the disease.

Tennessee’s first cases of raccoon strain rabies were identified in Carter County and Johnson County in June 2003, according to the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. Sullivan County didn’t have its first positive case of raccoon strain rabies until 2007.

One reason the disease has moved so slowly might be the Wildlife Services Program’s oral rabies vaccine efforts, where program biologists distribute by hand and by air hundreds of thousands of fish-meal-polymer baits containing a rabies vaccine.

In 2009, the program distributed 9.5 million vaccine packets in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia.

That year also marked the first time Wildlife Services Program biologists distributed the vaccine packets inside the Bristol, Tenn., city limits since its administrators started the oral rabies vaccine program in 1997.

That move came after program administrators decided to shift the vaccine distribution area – what one wildlife biologist called a “line in the sand” in its battle against raccoon strain rabies – five miles to the east.

The park

Patrick said Steele Creek Park serves as a perfect habitat for raccoons because it is a large wooded area with streams and a lake, surrounded by a steadily growing mixture of commercial and residential development.

Before Wildlife Services Program biologists started hand-distributing vaccine packets across Steele Creek and its surrounding area in October 2009, Patrick said, they did a study to see how many of the park’s raccoons were immune to the disease.

It will be about a year before the program gets the results from the raccoons trapped this week in Steele Creek Park, Warrior’s Path State Park in Kingsport, the Holston Army Ammunition Plant and Hawkins County’s Phipps Bend Industrial Park. But so far, the study of Steele Creek Park’s raccoons is showing some promising results: The number of raccoons that tested positive for the vaccine, and thus some immunity to rabies, grew from 8.9 percent in 2008 to 45.5 percent in 2009.

“We’ve never had any raccoons in Steele Creek Park test positive for rabies,” Patrick said, adding that the likelihood of that happening gets even smaller as more and more of the park’s raccoons develop immunity to the disease.

That translates into good news for the people who live around Steele Creek Park and could run into one of the raccoons or who have pets that might encounter a raccoon as the animals venture into their communities for food. Even more good news, Baker said, is the fact that “over the last couple of years [the number of rabies cases] seems to have really gone down.”

According to Patrick’s records, East Tennessee had 15 cases of raccoon strain rabies in 2008, six in 2009 and only five so far this year.

The total umber of rabies cases in Tennessee and Virginia also has been on the decline, dropping from 758 in 2008 to 530 so far this year, according to the Virginia Department of Health and the Tennessee Department of Health.

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