Rabies outbreak south of Montreal worries officials

July 16, 2007

(reprinted from CBC News Online)

Quebec public health officials have stepped up efforts to contain a rabies outbreak along the U.S. border that threatens to spread into Montreal as early as next year.

Health authorities say they've caught about 100 rabid raccoons in and around the village of Saint-Armand, in Quebec's Montérégie region, southeast of Montreal.

Animal specialists estimate as many as one in 15 raccoons in the area could be infected with the deadly virus, which is spread through saliva and attacks the nervous system.

Calling it a "beehive" of infection, Ministry of Natural Resources operations co-ordinator Pierre Canac-Marquis said the outbreak could extend into the greater Montreal region within months if left unchecked.

"If [we] don't intervene in a very strong way, rabies will probably hit Montreal next year. That's a lot of raccoons," he told CBC News.

Montreal has a burgeoning raccoon population, with about three animals living on every street block. In such dense quarters, a rabies outbreak would be disastrous, Canac-Marquis warned.

House pets are particularly vulnerable to rabies, said Jocelyne Sauvé, regional public health director in the Montérégie. Raccoons "can fight with domestic dogs, domestic cats, so they can infect our cats and dogs," she said.

Rabies can be fatal to humans if they don't get the proper antidote after being bitten.

Workers have set thousands of traps in a five-kilometre radius around Saint-Armand, a zone that extends to the Vermont-Quebec border, and are killing all raccoons within it as a precaution.

They've also launched an aggressive vaccination campaign over an eight-square-kilometre region. The vaccine is being delivered in cookies that are being dropped on the ground in the hopes the raccoons will eat them.

There was one case of animal rabies reported in Montreal last year.