The Us Is Tracking 14 Potential Rabies Outbreaks in 20 States
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The US is tracking 14 potential rabies outbreaks in 20 states, sparking concerns and skepticism about the severity of the situation and the accuracy of the reporting.
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Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
https://health.ucdavis.edu/news/headlines/experts-warn-clima...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11138229/
https://www.preventionweb.net/news/more-common-enemy-how-cli...
Edited to add another charming detail from the article: "A 2023 study published in the journal Vaccine found in a nationally representative sample of Americans that nearly 40% believed canine vaccines were unsafe and 37% believed that vaccines could lead their dogs to develop cognitive issues, such as autism."
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/rabies-outbreaks-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome
That specific dog made me just assume it was a possible thing, though I never verified with any veterinary website. It's worth a deeper look though.
""" About 37 percent of dog owners also believe that canine vaccination could cause their dogs to develop autism, even though there is no scientific data that validates this risk for animals or humans. """
https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/nearly-half-of-dog...
Incorrect. Of the respondents to that paper's survey, 84% said that their pets were fully vaccinated for Rabies.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45329845
They surveyed ~2200 people, of whom roughly half had pets. Of those, 84% were up-to-date on the Rabies vaccine. Another 5% didn't know.
It doesn't matter why the 84% of the pet-owning respondents were up-to-date on the vaccine, and moreover, you're just guessing. Maybe, as you say, it was "severe penalties" that compelled them. Or maybe they believe in the Rabies vaccine, and answered the other questions generally about all vaccines, since the questions weren't specific to Rabies. Maybe they were answering in theory, but felt differently for their pets.
The only thing you know is that they vaccinated their pets, which means that the entire premise of "vaccine hesitancy amongst pet owners" is unsupported by the evidence in the study.
> A new study has found that US dog owners who harbor mistrust in the safety and efficacy of childhood and adult vaccines are also more likely to hold negative views about vaccinating their four-legged friends.
They didn't claim that 37% are not vaccinating due to mistrust. They claimed that people hold negative views about vaccines with regards to pets. It was a study about beliefs not about actions.
The abstract states clearly.
> Canine vaccine hesitancy (CVH) can be thought about as dog owners’ skepticism about the safety and efficacy of administering routine vaccinations to their dogs. CVH is problematic not only because it may inspire vaccine refusal
It is certainly important for public policy to understand the trajectory of anti-scientific thinking in the community ( not withstanding that this thinking is now running the USA ) If today a large percentage of people are expressing vaccine hesitancy then next week maybe they stop vaccinating. This is a worthwhile attempt to understand what is going on. Calling it bogus is just wrong. They are also aware of their own limitations.
> Limitations & discussion. We view this work as an important first step in understanding canine vaccine hesitancy and its public health consequences. We recognize, of course, that some measures employed in this study are imperfect. For example, our measure of canine rabies vaccine uptake is self-reported, and therefore may be subject to inaccurate and/or biased recall. Correspondingly, we see future efforts to clinically validate self-reported vaccine uptake measures (as is often done with human vaccines; see [2] as an
But you just did a drive by "It's bogus" without even trying to understand the context.
> As Table 3 demonstrates, a large minority of dog owners consider vaccines administered to dogs to be unsafe (37%),
That is not the same thing as 84% having their pets fully vaccinated for Rabies which you know. As is obvious a person can have their dog be vaccinated but still have been hesitant about it due to feeling it is unsafe.
You have discounted the fact that it is, in many states, a civil offence not to vaccinate your dog.
https://www.animallaw.info/topic/table-rabies-vaccination-la...
Thus a person may, wishing not to be fined, vaccinate their dog but still hold anti vaccination beliefs.
CDC did publish something. The idea that it's "absolutely scary" is hilarious when you didn't do any research.
The same with training. Most dog owners are just lazy, and do not care. Adding some sophisticated explanations on top of that is pointless.
You are really giving dog owners too much agency!
In this case this reinforces their argument
To so many issues, watching as a bystander from the outside, solutions exist, but the US seems to have a penchant for ignoring them and then claiming their problem is somehow not comparable to everyone else’s.
https://www.farmersalmanac.com/parmentier-made-potatoes-popu...
> Still, even after all of Parmentier’s work, the French feared and hated potatoes. But Parmentier was undeterred. Determined to prove to his people that potatoes were, in fact, good, he started holding publicity stunts that included potatoes. He hosted stylish dinners featuring the maligned tuber, inviting such celebrities as Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier. Once, Parmentier made a bouquet of potato flowers to give to the King and Queen of France.
> With the publicity stunts failing to popularize potatoes, Parmentier tried a new tactic. King Louis XVI granted him a large plot of land at Sablons in 1781. Parmentier turned this land into a potato patch, then hired heavily armed guards to make a great show of guarding the potatoes. His thinking was that people would notice the guards and assume that potatoes must be valuable. Anything so fiercely guarded had to be worth stealing, right? To that end, Parmentier’s guards were given orders to allow thieves to get away with potatoes. If any enterprising potato bandits offered a bribe in exchange for potatoes, the guards were instructed to take the bribe, no matter how large or small.
> Sure enough, before too long, people began stealing Parmentier’s potatoes.
I've never known if the myth was true, but I've always wanted to try the trick with something to see if it works.
You should always go to the primary source.
Here's the Vaccine paper [1,2]. I don't say this often about papers, but this is total crap. They did a YouGov survey of 2200 people, and HILARIOUSLY, 84% of respondents stated that their dog was up-to-date on the Rabies vaccine (another 5% weren't sure.)
Oopsie! No matter...they just barge ahead with their pre-determined conclusions, and make a model of "Canine Vaccine Hesitancy" based on these responses anyway. BTW, I see no support for the claim that "40% believed canine vaccines were unsafe". The closest survey response is this one, at 30%:
> Most vaccines that dogs receive are not medically necessary
(You'll note that this is not a question about the Rabies vaccine. Just vaccines in general. And, of course, your guess is as good as mine what "most" means.)
The whole paper is almost designed to create a narrative of "vaccine hesitancy amongst pet owners" -- it asks some questions about how people feel about animal vaccine mandates and safety in general, then tries make a a model to predict negative responses (which they call "CVH"), and then they use that to predict opposition to mandatory vaccine policies.
At no point do they actually deal with the fact that the vast majority of their respondents, regardless of opinion, actually vaccinated their pet for Rabies. I don't know if Vaccine is a good journal, but this is just a classic example of a paper that should never have made it past peer review.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02644...
[2] (full text of draft here, where you can see the data) https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/qmbkv.html
Going to good ol' Wikipedia[0], "in countries where dogs commonly have the disease, more than 99% of rabies cases in humans are the direct result of dog bite. In the Americas, bat bites are the most common source of rabies infections in humans, and less than 5% of cases are from dogs." But the article is citing sources from 2011 - if TEN PERCENT of people aren't getting their dogs their rabies shots, that number is going to increase.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies
First of all, it's an internet survey of 2200 people. The data is garbage and you can't conclude anything from it. Huge error bars. I didn't lean on that point above, but it's fundamentally true.
Second, even assuming that the number is correct, who says it's a "big problem"? Rabies is not like the flu -- it requires direct, intimate contact for transmission. If the pets in question (like most pets) never meet a wild animal in their lives, the chances are high that it won't matter at all. Your main worry is dogs catching it from other dogs…but at a 90% vaccination rates and a rare event profile to begin with, that’s incredibly unlikely.
I grant you that it would be better to have 100% vaccination rates, but I doubt we’ve ever actually had that. Badness is relative.
You're right though, I don't know the exact threshold of unvaccinated pets where it really becomes a problem. And I also don't know how representative that survey is (I will admit I was waking up and didn't notice the source was an internet survey with a small sample size).
‡ I know, I know, they can put you in a coma and do some dramatic medical stuff and you might survive - but it's very expensive, of debatable efficacy, and even if it works you'll still probably have brain damage
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/rabies-death...
>In the United States ... contact with infected bats is the leading cause of human rabies deaths.
> The same goes for people planning to ... explore caves in regions where rabid bats have been.
>The clearest example is someone who has been bitten by a wild dog, bat, fox, raccoon or other animal known to carry rabies. If someone had direct contact with a bat — for instance, waking up to find a bat in the room — this is also considered a possible exposure unless a bite or scratch can be definitively ruled out. ... If you find a dead bat, do not throw it away. Do not touch it or allow other people or pets to touch it. Instead, call animal control so that the bat can be tested.
>In addition, try to prevent bats from getting inside your home through windows, chimneys or other holes.
Chagas disease is the one that scares me, since it seems easy to contract and not know it. Rabies is definitely more lethal but hopefully you could recognize the exposure event and get treated.
I remember the case of a woman in California, a teacher, who picked up a stunned bat that had accidentally flown into her school room one day. While she carried it over to the window to release it, the bat bit her without her even noticing. Weeks later she was diagnosed with rabies and died soon after. Only after the diagnosis did anyone make the connection to the incident with the little bat.
Just found a link, to confirm I'd remember the essential details right. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-teacher-dies-bitten-...
Edit: As for chagas, it's scary but not something worth blowing too far out of proportion either. I live in a country where chagas is endemic and even here it's exceptionally rare outside of deeply rural areas with lots of poverty and extremely low quality housing. The housing is a key transmission factor actually, since the bug tends to infect people with the parasite while they sleep, and it more easily enters barely-together rural shacks than it does properly built houses and apartments.
So is that high or low? It would be useful to know what the median and max cases per year has been over the last few decades.
14 potential doesn't sound that bad if we're investigating them out of an abundance of caution.
---
Edit: to semi-answer my own question, according to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/reported-rabies-deaths?ta... there were 7 deaths in 2011. So we are in a decade high, but with the numbers being so low in general seems like it might just be statistical noise.
I would say that 6 deaths is definitely high compared to 1-3 cases.
Rabies is almost 100% lethal after symptoms develop, and we don’t count people exposed who don’t develop symptoms as a rabies case.
If you’re traveling, it’s more important than ever to make sure your own vaccines are fully up to date. And if you’re in a high-risk group, the US may not be the safest destination in the near future.
Whatever you think of the current HHS leadership, pet dogs and wild animals are not getting rabies from unvaccinated humans.
When people get Rabies, they get it overwhelmingly from wild animals (or stray dogs in some parts of the world).
Rabies vaccines have never been required. You're only expected to get them after being bitten by a potentially-rabid animal.
Turning vaccines into quasi-religious totems is counter-productive. It should be a pure cost-benefit analysis. I am way more vaccinated than most people, side effects of my interesting career, but I am under no delusions that much of it is not an almost total waste as a matter of science.
Measles, yes. Rabies, lol no. If you conflate them people will rightly not trust you.
Actual CDC data: https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/php/protecting-public-health/inde...
Yes, there is a rise in rabies cases. In 2021 we experienced 2008 levels. The rise mostly has to do with domestic animal contact with bats: https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/media/releases/2022/p010...
It is also true that 40% of dog owning households don't get their dogs vaccinated because they don't believe animal vaccines are medically necessary or effective. 37% of dog owners also believe vaccines can give their dog autism: https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/nearly-half-of-dog...
There is no scientific evidence vaccines give dogs or humans autism.
First of all, no, that's not what this says. The exact quote is:
> according to the survey results, nearly 40 percent of dog owners believe that canine vaccines are unsafe, more than 20 percent believe these vaccines are ineffective, and 30 percent consider them to be medically unnecessary.
In fact, when you look at the paper they're citing [1], they notably do not state if the respondent actually vaccinated their pet. Not sure why....
(EDIT: Actually, it's worse than that! I found a draft of the full text, and a full 84% of respondents vaccinated their pets for Rabies! [2] You can't make this stuff up. See my other comment for more [3]).
Second, it's based on a YouGov (aka, a web survey) of 2200 people:
> The survey was conducted between March 30 and April 10, 2023 among 2,200 dog owners who answered questions through the research sampling firm YouGov.
I would be very hesitant to draw any conclusions from this at all.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02644...
[2] https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/qmbkv.html
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45329845
It's worth checking with your state's health or wildlife department to learn which of those may have rabies in your state.
There are enough geographical barriers to divide many of those kinds of animals into multiple groups groups that are have either no contact with other groups or only rare contact. You might say have two distinct populations separated by a high mountain range. You can then have a group on one side where rabies is endemic and a group on the other side with no rabies.
A great example of isolated populations is Washington state, where no wild terrestrial mammal has ever been documented with rabies.
Some still freak out on Nextdoor if they see a Washington raccoon wander through their neighborhood in the daytime, posting warnings to keep children and pets inside to avoid rabies. They are partly spooked by merely seeing the raccoon because they know raccoons are nocturnal and so figure something must be wrong with it to make it come out in the daytime. They've often heard raccoons mentioned as rabies carries so jump to that as the explanation.
Raccoons are mostly nocturnal, but they will come out in the daytime to look for food if they aren't able to find enough food at night. In a place where the raccoons are barely getting by they may be out a lot in the daytime and people would get used to it. But at least around here they seem to be fine most of the year. It's only when they are pregnant or have young that they need to come out in the daytime, and that's not often enough for people to get used to seeing them.