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magazine / ma00
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March/April 2000 issue |
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FEATURE - RACCOONS AND RABIES
Outbreak at the border
Ontario mobilizes against a new strain of rabies
By Scott Gardiner
ON A MONDAY evening last July near Prescott, Ont., Jeffrey Vail went out
to check on his dogs and found a dead raccoon.
"It was right there in the kennel," says the 29-year-old truck
driver. "It had to climb over the fence to get in." It was clear
to Vail that his pets had attacked the raccoon and killed it. He also knew
that it was abnormal for any wild animal to deliberately enter an enclosure
with three large dogs. Vail was worried enough to get in touch with the Canadian
Food Inspection Agency office in nearby Brockville. None of his dogs had been
vaccinated against rabies. The next morning, July 13, a CFIA veterinarian
removed the raccoon’s head and sent it to the Animal Disease Research
Institute laboratory near Ottawa. The test results the following day were
even worse than anyone had feared. Not only had the specimen tested positively
for rabies, but for a new and dreaded form of the disease. By Thursday afternoon,
Vail’s dogs had been euthanized — among the earliest but by no
means the last victims of Canada’s first contact with the raccoon strain
of rabies.
Rick Rosatte, a senior research scientist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural
Resources, was driving from Sudbury to MNR headquarters in Peterborough when
he got the news on his cellphone. He immediately began making calls from his
truck. First priority was to contact the other members of the emergency response
team and get them moving as quickly as possible to the Prescott region along
the St. Lawrence River. Before day’s end, Rosatte, eight support staff,
and 15 professional trappers from various parts of the province were en route
to an urgent new assignment.
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Raccoon rabies was first reported in Florida in the 1940s. Last summer,
the first Canadian raccoon infected with the strain was found in eastern Ontario. Rick Rosatte of the Ontario
Ministry of Natural Resources immediately called in a team of trappers in an effort to contain the disease.
(Photo: Pierre St. Jacques)
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Trapper Ross Chambers had just finished checking his sets around Niagara
Falls when Rosatte tracked him down at about four o’clock. "There
wasn’t even time to tell my wife I was going," he recalls. "I
left a note saying, ’Rabies outbreak east of Kingston — call whenever
I can.’" It is a distance of nearly 500 kilometres from Niagara
Falls to Prescott and, after picking up his traps, Chambers had already put
in the equivalent of a double shift. "I drank a lot of coffee between
here and there," he admits.
The flat, alluvial countryside around Prescott was unfamiliar to most of
the team, so they spent the early part of Thursday reconnoitring the new territory.
Still, by nightfall, with no time out for food or rest, each trapper had placed
his 100 sets within his assigned trap cell. At daybreak next morning,
a campaign six years in the making began in earnest.
The goal was nothing less than the capture and removal of every raccoon
and skunk that might have come in contact with the infected animal. During
the next seven days, Rosatte’s team would euthanize hundreds of raccoons
and scores of skunks, as well as vaccinating and releasing 281 cats. "We’d
been planning this since 1993," he says, "so we knew how fast we
had to act."
Rabies is a virus of baffling peculiarities. Although all strains of the
disease are capable of infecting any mammal, several variants have developed
a preference for particular species. Ontario — which for reasons of geography
has traditionally recorded 85 percent of all rabies cases in Canada — has
long been most familiar with the fox strain. Fox rabies originated in the
Far North among arctic foxes, transferred itself to the red fox population,
and during the 1950s began working southward. By the mid-1980s, Ontario was
recording more than 2,000 cases a year. By 1998, however, the entire province
recorded only 78 cases of the fox strain.
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