Three in four Americans live where a wild animal carries rabies

Rabies in the United States is a rare disease sustained by an enormous amount
of routine work.

Before 1960, several hundred people died of rabies each year. The drop is
the result of coordinated human and animal health work, not of the disease
going away.

Rabies is still out there

**Three out of four Americans live in a community where raccoons, skunks or
foxes carry rabies.**

**Around 4,000 animal rabies cases are reported each year, and more than 90%
are in wildlife** — bats, raccoons, skunks, foxes.

That is a large change from the 1960s, when **domestic animals, mainly dogs,
accounted for most cases**. The reservoir moved from pets to wildlife, which
is a success in itself: the animals people live with stopped being the danger.

What keeps the number under ten

The decrease in human deaths is attributed directly to:

• Successful vaccination of pets, and animal control programmes
• Public health tracking and testing of human and animal rabies cases

And the infrastructure behind that: **the CDC houses the only US reference
laboratory for diagnosing rabies**, supporting laboratories, health
departments and hospitals, and runs the **National Rabies Surveillance
System** to monitor how rabies is spreading.

What the numbers actually mean

One hundred thousand courses of post-exposure prophylaxis a year, to prevent
fewer than ten deaths, looks like a poor ratio until you remember that rabies,
once symptoms begin, is essentially always fatal.

There is no treatment after that point. The entire strategy is to intervene
before the disease starts, in everyone who might have been exposed — and the
1.4 million medical visits are what that costs.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.