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March/April 2000 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Raccoons Curious by nature

This triumph was due in large part to the efforts of the Rabies Research Unit, a unique department of MNR created in the 1960s. Adapting known technologies and inventing new ones as needed, the unit developed a method of immunizing wild foxes by oral vaccine.

Each fall since 1989, three Twin Otter aircraft carrying specially developed bait-dispensing equipment have crisscrossed every square kilometre of southern Ontario — along computer-generated flight paths designed by the geographic information systems lab at Queen’s University in Kingston — and dropped nearly one million vanilla-flavoured baits from low altitude. Every bait contains a dose of vaccine. A fox eats one and is immunized.

Raccoon rabies, on the other hand, is a separate battle altogether. When speaking of the raccoon strain, Charlie MacInnes, head of the Rabies Research Unit, chooses his words more cautiously. "It’s a different form of the disease," he says, "spread by a different animal. We have to combat it on that basis."

For a start, there are 10 times as many raccoons in the province as there are foxes. And raccoons — as anyone with a back porch garbage pail will attest — are much more likely to interact with humans than foxes.

"In the U.S.," says MacInnes, "raccoon rabies is already established over an area of at least one million square kilometres. Our American counterparts are in serious trouble. Right now they are spending more than $300 million a year on rabies control programs. There are 19 separate state governments involved. It’s very difficult in that environment to coordinate an effective response."

In Ontario, scientists with the Rabies Research Unit have watched the raccoon strain sweep unchecked through the mid-Atlantic states up through Pennsylvania, New York, and into neighbouring Vermont. "We knew we’d get it eventually," MacInnes says matter-of-factly. So, in 1992, representatives of the provincial ministries of health, agriculture and natural resources met to devise a response to the inevitable. "We had a bunch of civil servants," recalls MacInnes, "who agreed we had a problem here that didn’t fit any one of our departments. So we said to hell with departmental boundaries."

The result was the Raccoon Rabies Task Force, which first identified the areas most vulnerable to penetration. "Judging by its spread through New York," says MacInnes, "we thought initially that the Niagara region would be the most likely place." So, in 1994, MNR hired seven trappers to live-trap and vaccinate raccoons in a 700-square-kilometre area from Niagara Falls to the Welland Canal. The team has been there from June to October every year since creating a buffer zone of immunized animals.

It was apparent, though, that the eastern side of the province was also in jeopardy. As raccoon rabies got closer to Watertown, N.Y., MNR sent trappers along the St. Lawrence River from Kingston to Mallorytown and around all the international bridges.

The province also contributed significant resources to combating the disease on the American side of the river. As part of a program undertaken in co-operation with Cornell University in New York, Ontario’s Twin Otters baited tracts in that state and Vermont. "It made sense to fight the virus where it already was," says MacInnes, "rather than waiting for the fight to come to us." Nevertheless, the worst-case scenario had to be taken into account. Thus was conceived the Point Infection Control plan. On July 12, 1999, Jeffrey Vail’s kennel became ground zero for this effort.

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