Battle Against Rabies Heats Up On Cape Cod

Students from Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine are aiding in the effort to fight rabies on Cape Cod this summer.

No. Grafton, Mass. [07.24.06] Spending the summer on Cape Cod – a popular Massachusetts vacation spot – has a different meaning for a group of students from Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University who have volunteered to trap and test animals for the Cape Cod Oral Rabies Vaccine Project. The students are trying to determine the effectiveness of a new type of bait in vaccinating Cape Cod’s raccoons and other wild animals against the disease, which has spread rapidly though the region in recent years.

The animals are being tested to gather data that “are essential to an effort to push rabies back beyond the Bourne and Sagamore bridges,” the Cape Cod Times reported. “For 10 years there was no rabies on the Cape because bait infused with vaccine was dropped on both sides of the Cape Cod Canal as a rabies buffer,” the newspaper reported. A case of rabies detected in a raccoon in 2004 marked the beginning of a second wave of the disease and another round of vaccinations.

Controlling raccoon rabies in wildlife is a very cost-effective public health effort, when compared to the $1,500 medical care needed to protect a person exposed to the disease, which can be fatal without such treatment.

In May, volunteers from the Massachusetts Oral Rabies Vaccination Program—a collaboration among Tufts’ Cummings Veterinary School, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the U.S. Department of Agriculture/Wildlife Services, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—dropped fish-meal bait containing the rabies vaccine in 10 towns spanning from Yarmouth to Provincetown.

Assistant research professors Dr. Janet Martin (V’90) and Dr. Alison Robbins (V’92), who both work in the veterinary school’s environmental and population health department, coordinated the trapping and testing program.

Martin told the newspaper that 60,000 pieces of bait were laid at predetermined intervals throughout the region. If volunteers thought pets would be likely to get the bait or a driveway got in the way, they dropped the bait elsewhere. “That’s part of the art of baiting,” she told the Times.

Along with Martin and Robbins, Cummings veterinary students Katie Halfen, Jessamyn Kennedy and Anna Ludi are part of the effort to determine whether or not the latest bait drop was successful

According to the Times, the veterinary school students capture the animals and anesthetize them before weighing them, taking a blood sample and removing a small tooth, which serves as an indicator of whether or not the animals have eaten the newest bait. Blood samples, the newspaper reported, are then sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta for rabies testing.

“She gave us some blood, a tooth. She’s got her jewelry. Now she’ll go impress all her friends,” Halfen told the Times after she tagged a raccoon’s ear to show that it had been tested.

In testing, Halfen and her fellow volunteers use “a protocol designed to gather the most information and cause the least discomfort to the animal,” the newspaper reported.

The traps, which are used to catch the animals for testing, are located on town property or on the land of owners who have given permission. Cape Cod resident and Tufts alumnus Dr. Arthur Bickford, who graduated from the School of Medicine in 1953, told the Times that he was happy to help his alma mater.

“I talked to my friends out in the woods and they said as long as they let them go that’s all right,” Bickford told the Times.

After taking the blood and tooth samples, the volunteers place the animals back in the traps and release them once the anesthesia wears off, the newspaper reported.