USDA expanding front line of antirabies campaign in East.(Brief Article)

2002 JUN 19 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Yellow planes dropping vaccine-laden fishmeal cakes will soon be flying above Pennsylvania as the federal government expands the front lines of a biological warfare campaign. The enemy: rabies.

Pennsylvania will join a handful of eastern states in which the U.S. Department of Agriculture is concentrating efforts to stop raccoon rabies from invading the Midwest and trying to erase the gains the disease has made in the East over the past 20 years.

"We are working toward a containment strategy," said Dennis Slate, head of the USDA's program against rabies.

Over the past 5 years, the USDA has spent more than $42 million in a federal war against rabies by mining the wilderness with the treated fishmeal cakes dropped from airplanes or placed by hand to inoculate animals.

The USDA's strategy is to halt the advance of rabies by creating swaths of rabies-resistant populations and possibly push the disease out of the states where it has become entrenched.

Previously limited to southeastern states, such as Alabama, Florida and Georgia, raccoon rabies got a toehold in West Virginia in the 1970s when raccoons were brought from the southeast to replenish the Appalachian population.

After the first reported mid-Atlantic case of raccoon rabies in 1978, the disease quickly spread north and east, hampered only by mountains and the Great Lakes. It also traveled south, reaching North Carolina as rabies spreading northward arrived in the state.