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July 16, 2007
Rabies outbreak south of Montreal worries
officials
(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.
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