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Transcript:
Hey, did you really enjoy my previous videos about the unprecedented outbreak of measles in the United States under our antivaccine, anti-science authoritarian government? How about my previous videos about the unprecedented outbreak of cyclospora? You did? Good, because you’re going to love this video about the latest unprecedented disease outbreak: RABIES. Yes, rabies.
Last week, the CDC announced that they were tracking a 17% increase in “rabies-related inquiries” this summer compared to last year, with at least eight state health departments reporting an increase in the use of the post-exposure rabies vaccine.
This is obviously shocking: someone still works at the CDC? Someone who can count and do basic percentages? My gobs are smacked.
Okay, it’s also shocking because 17% is a huge increase and because, as I mentioned a few years back in my video about P’nut the Squirrel (RIP), rabies is an absolutely terrifying disease. It removes animals’ fear, increases aggression, and increases their saliva production, leading to a very easy mode of transmission via biting. It can infect all warm-blooded creatures and even some cold-blooded creatures, and in humans it is almost always fatal once symptoms appear. It is a horrible, slow, painful way to die.
The good news is that scientists like Louis Pasteur figured out a vaccine way back in the 19th century, and today’s vaccine is extremely effective and safe provided it is administered before those symptoms appear, which is why it’s critical for people to get the vaccine as soon as possible after exposure.
As someone who grew up in a rural area, for DECADES now I have taken any and every opportunity to share this advice: if you ever wake up and there’s a bat in the same room as you, you should assume that bat bit you and you should capture it for testing. If you can’t capture it, you should go to the hospital and get the rabies vaccine just to be safe. Bat teeth are very tiny and you might have been bit without even noticing.
Also, rabies was eradicated in the UK but if you live anywhere else, you absolutely must vaccinate your pets and keep them up to date. In the US, bats are the most common vector but globally, it’s dogs.
Okay, so is this outbreak of rabies the fault of the Trump administration, as we can reasonably say the measles and cyclospora outbreaks are? Well, no, not really. Laws and regulations regarding rabies are set by individual states and cities, which differ in what they require. California, for example, only requires people to vaccinate their dogs.
The biggest factor contributing to the increase this summer stemmed from one mobile petting zoo located in North Carolina, which, like most states, requires dogs, cats, and ferrets to be vaccinated. However, they do not require people to vaccinate their farm animals, even if those animals are being toted around the state to assisted living facilities, back to school parties, and private events.
I have to admit that as an animal lover and an understander of infectious disease, I know this story is very sad and scary, but I have to say that it’s kind of darkly funny, because the animals that led 284 people to have to get the vaccine to prevent them from dying of rabies was…baby goats.
I’m so sorry, I love goats, and I love baby goats, and I got to see a baby goat take its first few steps on a farm once and I thought I was going to die of the cuteness, and it’s that overwhelming cuteness, combined with the long history of humans relating goats to Satan, that makes the idea of out-of-control rabid baby goats biting children at a birthday party just a little bit funny. Okay, sorry, I just had to admit that.
But yeah it IS tragic: according to the petting zoo’s owner, they actually do vaccinate their animals even though it isn’t required by the state, but four baby goats were too young to be vaccinated and so they were kept in a separate pen. But, according to the owner, a skunk got into their enclosure at the end of July, and the workers shot and burned it. Which is weird. You’re keeping these goats separated because they aren’t vaccinated, but it didn’t occur to you that a wild animal you found in the pen with them might have infected them with rabies? And all you’d have to do after shooting the skunk is continue to keep the baby goats separated (from the other animals INCLUDING HUMAN VISITORS) while you send the corpse to get tested? Baffling.
By the way, not to put too fine a point on it, but that was exactly why experts said P’nut the Squirrel should have been vaccinated: he was allowed contact with wild animals, as well as with humans, which made him a vector for rabies.
Anyway, at least three of the four goats were infected and all of them were euthanized, while nearly 400 people had to go get the rabies vaccine, which is actually a series of 2 to 4 shots you have to take over the course of a week, which costs about $500. Per shot. At a minimum. Post-exposure rabies treatment can hit around $10,000, total.
The good news is that despite the increase in cases this summer, rabies remains a relatively rare disease, with only an average of 2.4 human rabies cases per year in the US from 2000 to 2024.
OR IS IT RARE??? Because last month, researchers published this paper in Communications Health: Substantial under-detection of human rabies cases in the United States. In their calculation, the actual number of rabies cases from 2000 to 2024 isn’t around 60, but 856!
They got that number thanks to organ donors: in that 25 year period, three organ donors out of about 239,000 tested positive for rabies after they had died. If we assume those organ donors had the same risk of rabies as the rest of the population, simple math suggests that only 7% of human rabies cases have been confirmed in recent years.
The authors concede that there might be different risks depending on geography and socioeconomic status, and obviously a group of only three cases is a pretty small sample size, but it does strongly suggest that rabies cases are underdiagnosed to some degree, and that’s pretty scary.
How are people walking around with rabies without knowing it? Well, as I said, you can get rabies from a bat bite you don’t even notice, or from a cat scratch that you don’t think twice about. Symptoms can take up to a year to emerge, and those symptoms vary from person to person and don’t necessarily match what we think of when we picture a racoon foaming at the mouth, and rabies can kill through methods that can also easily be attributed to something else, like encephalitis, or brain inflammation.
So please, vaccinate your pets and be cognizant of any scratches you get from wild or unknown animals. And the next time you go to a petting zoo, or as my partner calls them, “Touch the Stink,” maybe think twice before letting that adorable baby goat nibble on your hand.
