A pair of sick raccoons found this month in a Los Angeles suburb set off alarm bells from California to Georgia, where officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took notice. The animals, found three weeks apart in Westlake Village, are the first raccoons in the county to test positive for rabies since 1973.
Rabies is a deadly virus that attacks the nervous system and spreads via the saliva of an infected animal, usually through a bite. Across different U.S. regions, distinct variants of rabies are more common depending on what animal is most likely to harbor the virus. In California, bats and skunks are most likely to have the disease, so bat and skunk rabies variants are the most common. Other mammals, like a coyote, dog or cat, can still get sick by the bat or skunk rabies variant. But what worries public health experts is the possible arrival of an unexpected rabies variant that could spread widely among a new animal population.
Dr. Ryan Wallace, a veterinary epidemiologist at the CDC, told SFGATE if the raccoons tested positive for a raccoon variant of rabies, that could trigger a multimillion-dollar federal and state response to combat that newly arrived strain of disease and decrease the risk of human cases…