Disease remains a costly public health threat, says virologist.

2004 JAN 21 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Hardly anyone in the U.S. gets rabies anymore. It's a Third World problem. Everyone vaccinates their cats and dogs, and there's a safe, effective - albeit expensive - vaccine for people. Most of us hardly think about rabies at all.

Maybe we should start. Rabies, an ancient viral disease that conjures up images of mad dogs foaming at the mouth, hasn't really gone away.

"Rabies continues to be a problem, more than most people realize," said renowned virologist Hilary Koprowski, MD, professor of microbiology and immunology and director of the Biotechnology Foundation Laboratories and the Center for Neurovirology at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. "People think that because there are few or no cases of human rabies in this country, there is no problem. But people are bitten all the time by dogs, cats and wild animals that are susceptible to rabies."

The death of a Virginia man in March 2003 - the first raccoon rabies-related human death - underscores Koprowski's point. What's more, he said, rabies control costs in the U.S. are soaring, approaching $1 billion a year.

Koprowski should know. Decades ago, he helped develop a life-saving rabies vaccine that replaced the painful series of shots in the stomach that those who were exposed had to endure. The vaccine, together with an effective public health-initiated vaccination campaign for domestic cats and dogs, has reduced the cases of human rabies in this country to a trickle. Today, Koprowski remains on the forefront of rabies vaccine research.

Rabies shows up in the newspaper and magazine headlines from time to time. More than 2 decades ago in the late 1970s, rabies made the news when an outbreak of raccoon rabies reached epidemic proportions and began quickly moving up the East Coast from Virginia and West Virginia. A subsequent U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and U.S. Department of Agriculture-led mass inoculation program of wildlife (through an oral vaccine in bait) has virtually stopped the spread of raccoon rabies, and scientists hope to contain it below the Great Lakes to the north, the Appalachians to the west and from the Gulf of Mexico to the south. In fact, said Charles Rupprecht, VMD, PhD, chief of the Rabies Section at the CDC, ...