Rare Rabies Strain Found in Nebraska

Rare Rabies Strain Found in Nebraska
Rare Rabies Strain Found in Nebraska

United States – A mass outbreak after a stray kitten from Nebraska fell ill and died from rabies in 2023 led to a vast public health campaign to find out how the feline became infected, as reported by HealthDay.

That’s because the strain of rabies the 6-week-old kitten carried had never been detected so far west: The last two other cases of raccoon strain of RRVV were detected hundreds of kilometers east, the investigators noted.

“A coordinated multiagency response was initiated to determine if local transmission of RRVV was occurring and to implement a wildlife vaccination program,” said a team led by Sydney Stein, an investigator with the U.S. CDC.

Investigation and Preventive Measures

This kitten was sampled from Omaha, and it was positive for the RRVV strain of rabies when it died “neurologically ill and after having bitten and scratched its caretakers,” the researchers explained.

Ten individuals had some possibility of developing rabies after an interaction with the kitten; all of them received early preventive treatments that saved them from a neural death.

“Rabies is a fatal, yet preventable, viral disease primarily transmitted through the bite of infected animals; after exposure, the incubation can last from weeks to months,” Stein and his colleagues explained.

Although rabies has been prevented in the United States, with less than 10 people dying of the disease every year.

RRVV is an emerging variant of rabies that was first identified in raccoons that traveled up the eastern coastline of Florida. Localized human exposures occurred due to raccoon outbreaks across the eastern part of the United States.

But those cases have all occurred at least 850 miles east of the kitten’s Omaha home, Stein’s group pointed out.

Emerging Concerns

However, there seemed to be no good intelligence when the CDC, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Nebraska state health bodies tried to find out how a feline had caught the virus and which home-bred kitten had brought it into the community.

They also increased local rabies awareness and established a program to test raccoons, skunks, feral cats, and other animals for rabies, which affected hundreds of them. None of these animals were found to have been infected with the disease.

Wildlife Vaccination Initiative

The team also pioneered a trap-and-release program in the fall of 2023 that vaccinated a larger number of raccoons, skunks, and feral cats against the viral disease.

The result was reassuring: “No further detection of RRVV over a 10-month surveillance period” was found, the research team said.

That, along with the broad vaccination amongst the wildlife in Nebraska and the non-vector-borne transmission, also implies the absence of establishment of RRVV in wildlife, they said, as reported by HealthDay.

Although the specific circumstances of the kitten’s infection are unknown, Stein’s group pointed out that responses like the one provided by the Omaha team are considered “essential” for the prevention of rabies across the United States.