Rabies vs. Ebola – Which is Scarier?
Which scares you more, Ebola or rabies? Ebola is certainly frightening, and an unknown. There’s no vaccine yet or cure. But, about 50 percent of people affected survive. Rabies has been around for a long, long time and so far there have been fewer than 10 documented cases of humans surviving clinical rabies. It was thought to be 100 percent fatal if left untreated. Rabies is found on all continents except Antarctica and still kills roughly 55,000 people worldwide annually. Fortunately, there is a vaccine available to prevent and treat rabies, which is effective even if given post-exposure.
We recently had a scare at the shelter when a cat that had been brought in as a stray showing neurological symptoms and excessively drooling, bit one of our employees. Even scarier was the fact the cat died overnight – so much for quarantining him for the 10 days required by law. Needless to say, the affected employee was quite worried. The truth is, you don’t hear much about rabies here in America anymore. Because of the legal requirement to vaccinate and license all dogs, the rate of rabies has dropped dramatically. In fact in California, most of the documented cases of rabies reported occur in wildlife. According to the Sonoma County Dept. of Health Services, there have been only 15 positive animals documented since 2010: 13 bats, one fox and one domestic cat.
In Rohnert Park, you are also required to vaccinate (and license) cats, in addition to dogs. However, similar to the issue of vaccinating children, people are getting lax about keeping their pets’ vaccines current. Concerns about side effects, vaccine induced sarcomas, the risks attached to over-vaccinating pets, not to mention expense and sheer laziness has led more and more people to skip vaccinating their pets. Because of this I’m betting that we will start hearing about more cases of positive rabies in the pet population within our county. What does this mean to you? What happens if a stray animal bites you?
All dogs and cats that bite a person are required to be under a minimum 10-day quarantine, even if vaccinated. This is because vaccines can fail (rarely, but it could happen), so observing the animal is the only way to know for sure that it does not have rabies. Rabies is usually transmitted via a bite – it is secreted in the saliva. An infected animal can only transmit rabies after the onset of clinical signs. And once an animal is showing clinical symptoms, it would die within a few days. So if an animal survives the 10-day quarantine we can safely assume it was not shedding the rabies virus.
That’s why the cat dying overnight was so frightening. But, because the animal was dead we could send it off to the lab to be tested right away for rabies (they have to cut off the head and test the actual brain so you can’t do it to a live animal). The good news is that we got same day results that the cat was negative for rabies. The bad news is that the employee, based on the advice from his doctor, had already started the series of post-exposure vaccines and will need to finish them.
Although this animal was not rabid it brings home the importance of making sure all our dogs and cats are protected against this threat. We know it exists in our wildlife population, and there was one positive cat here in Sonoma County in the last couple of years (that cat’s whole family and everyone that handled it at the vet clinic needed to go through this expensive series of vaccines). Protect your pets so you don’t have to go through this kind of scare.