3 People die from Rabies Infected Organs

[GT98]

Whoa Talk about bad luck

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=1&u=/nm/20040701/ts_nm/health_rabies_dc

[Ajax]

GT98, Is that Cujo in your avatar?

[Jon P. Inghram]

Yuck, rabies is an awful way to go too.

[Brian Ellis]

That's a nasty one.

In the 1980s, there was a wave of a virulent strain of rabies crossed Europe, the main (but not only) vector being foxes. A number of countries took strong action. All dogs and cats were mandatorily vaccinated and had to wear a distinctive blue medal. Strays caught without the medal were isolated and systematically destroyed after 5 days (owners could reclaim them in that time only if they showed a valid vaccination certificate). Any wild or domestic animal with suspicious illness was destroyed and incinerated. Above all, hundreds of thousands of chicken heads containing an oral vaccine dose were scattered over Europe for the foxes to eat. This was highly successful and the rabies was effectively eliminated from the countries so participating within two years, although the measures were not relaxed for another decade.

During the whole wave, in Switzerland, about 100,000 persons who were even suspected of coming within a certain radius of an infected animal were prophylactically vaccinated (e.g., a domesticated deer in a childrens park above Lausanne got the disease and several thousand persons who had visited the park were traced and dealt with). Two persons died of it during the whole wave. One was bitten by his own dog (unvaccinated) who was behaving peculiarly and subsequently died with typical symptoms; he didn't report it nor did he have himself vaccinated. The other case was odder, but I don't have the details; all I know is that the person got it from a dying wild deer and didn't think she could have been infected. No case was recorded of a dog or cat which had been vaccinated getting the disease.

Because rabies has been shown to be able to be effectively contained, it surprises me rather, in this case, that if a region were able to conduct organ transplants that it couldn't make rabies less endemic. Even worse is the sentence implying that this problem occurs relatively frequently with corneal transplants.