13 new cases of rabies

PERTH COUNTY — A calf at a Perth County barn has tested positive for rabies, the first arctic fox rabies detected since 2012 when it was found in a skunk, also in Perth County.
The farmer at Ellice Ward, in Perth East Township, called a vet when the calf acted strangely. Once the test was positive for rabies, the farm was put under quarantine. An OMAFRA spokesperson would not release the type of farm but said it’s not a beef or milking herd. The last case of an Ontario farm being quarantined was at Owen Sound in 2011.
Any rabies can spread across different species, said Chris Davies, manager of wildlife research with the Ministry of Natural Resources. While officials thought the arctic fox rabies was eradicated, they now believe there was an isolated population that somehow escaped the bait traps, causing the strain to now pop up again.
“If I was a betting man, and anybody who’s ever worked around a farm like I have, would say unlikely that it’s a fox,” he said. “It’s most likely a skunk or a raccoon, but we’ll probably never know.”
There are other new rabies cases. In the Hamilton area, 12 raccoons tested positive for rabies since December. This was the first rabies outbreak in Ontario since September 2005. MNR believes raccoon rabies came from the United States on a train or transport truck. The MNR dropped 220,000 stick-of-gum-sized vaccination baits, in that area since the outbreak.
There were only 18 reported cases of rabies in Ontario in 2014, all in big brown bats. That’s a far cry from the 3,600 cases in 1986. The numbers started to decrease dramatically after 1989 when vaccination baits were air-dropped throughout Ontario.
The last outbreak of raccoon rabies was from 1999 to 2005 near Brockville, in Eastern Ontario, when there were 132 cases over a six-year period.
The MNR will monitor Perth County for more cases, and may set more vaccination-baits this spring. The province dropped 100,000 vaccine baits last year, mostly in the Niagara region between the Welland Canal and the Niagara River.