DATE: Monday, June 30, 1997                 TAG: 9706300024

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 

SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS 

DATELINE: RALEIGH                           LENGTH:   69 lines

RABIES EPIDEMIC SWEEPS ACROSS STATE THE NUMBER OF CASES HAS EXPLODED AND LITTLE CAN BE DONE TO CONTROL IT.

Hardly a day goes by that you don't hear about it - wild bats in a fraternity house, a beaver attacking boaters, a crazed fox running into a home.

The rabies epidemic has hit North Carolina hard. In just seven years, the number of cases has skyrocketed, from 10 in 1990 to an expected 1,500 this year.

And even the experts aren't quite sure where it will end.

``The numbers will start plateauing after a while,'' said Lee Hunter, the state's public health veterinarian.

That's because once the epidemic has covered the state, the numbers will stop growing so quickly.

The bad news is that once the growth slows, ``the problem will probably continue to exist,'' Hunter said. ``It may wax and wane, but it doesn't seem to go away.''

Epidemics that started decades ago in New England and New York still have not disappeared.

Hunter said stopping the disease cold is so difficult because halting its spread among wild animals is nearly impossible.

``I was at a meeting at the Centers for Disease Control and even they were saying, `Yeah, if you had billions of dollars, maybe you could stop it.' '' But without those billions, he said, the only actions are those North Carolina has been taking for decades: Education, vaccination and animal control.

Experts say there is little more that North Carolina could have done to slow the epidemic.

Three separate outbreaks of rabies have converged on North Carolina in the past seven years - one from Tennessee, largely involving skunks; and others from Florida and the New Jersey-Pennsylvania area, both mostly involving raccoons.

Hunter said programs tried in other states have shown only that they are expensive and don't always work well.

Ohio, which has rabies entering from only one area on its Pennsylvania border, has tried placing vaccine-impregnated bait in that area, hoping to reduce raccoon-to-raccoon spread.

Texas is running a similar program in one area where a strain of rabies endemic to coyotes is entering from Mexico. New Jersey, bordered on three sides by rivers and the ocean, tried to use treated bait to vaccinate wildlife, making a sort of vaccination firewall on its land borders.

That failed, Hunter said.

North Carolina actually resisted the rabies outbreaks all around it partially because the 1950s epidemic resulted in better rabies programs than some other states, said Dr. Jay Levine, associate professor of epidemiology and public health at N.C. State University. Mandatory dog and cat immunization programs helped to almost eradicate rabies in the state then.

``Back then there was more human exposure through contact with nonvaccinated dogs than with wildlife,'' he said, so the vaccination program removed virtually all danger of rabies to people.

Over the next decades, an occasional case involving a bat or skunk was about all the activity the state saw. But outbreaks in other states finally did spread.

Because massive drops of vaccinated bait aren't likely to succeed - and would bankrupt the state anyway - and development has caused a lot more North Carolinians to encroach on raccoon habit. ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Mary Ann Harville of Chapel Hill brought her two collies to Carrboro

for rabies vaccinations. Orange County has been hard hit by the

epidemic. KEYWORDS: RABIES NORTH CAROLINA EPIDEMIC

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