Here's an article from late August with some detail [1], including the affected states: New York, Massachusetts, Alaska, Arizona, California, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, North Carolina, Oregon and Vermont. I can't find anything about it on the CDC website though.
Edited to add another charming detail from the article: "A 2023 study published in the journal Vaccine found in a nationally representative sample of Americans that nearly 40% believed canine vaccines were unsafe and 37% believed that vaccines could lead their dogs to develop cognitive issues, such as autism."
It's absolutely scary that the CDC hasn't published anything about it. They were the ultimate source of epidemiological information, weren't they? We knew this was coming. But this is the clearest sign yet that we have entered the medical dark ages.
Yes, the medical dark ages. Not the metaphorical kind either, but the kind where people die foaming at the mouth because their neighbor decided a rabies shot might cause dog autism. The CDC has apparently chosen the new strategy of “if we ignore it, maybe it will go away,” which worked wonders in the 14th century. Soon, every PTA meeting will double as a plague ward while Etsy sellers crank out crystal collars to protect your doodle from brain inflammation. The irony is perfect: the world’s richest country, armed with billion-dollar labs, yet losing a fight our grandparents solved with a needle and some common sense. When your local ER is triaging between toddlers bitten by strays and adults bitten by TikTok misinformation, maybe then people will realize the dark ages don’t arrive with torches and pitchforks. They arrive with Facebook posts and silence from the institutions that should have known better.
I thought perhaps you were joking but it turns out people are also hesitant to vaccinate their pets.
"""
About 37 percent of dog owners also believe that canine vaccination could cause their dogs to develop autism, even though there is no scientific data that validates this risk for animals or humans.
"""
I didn't "highlight a quote". I showed that the entire paper is invalid. They use poor methodology and base their model of "vaccine hesitance" on a population with self-admitted high rates of vaccination.
> Edited to add another charming detail from the article: "A 2023 study published in the journal Vaccine found in a nationally representative sample of Americans that nearly 40% believed canine vaccines were unsafe and 37% believed that vaccines could lead their dogs to develop cognitive issues, such as autism."
You should always go to the primary source.
Here's the Vaccine paper [1,2]. I don't say this often about papers, but this is total crap. They did a YouGov survey of 2200 people, and HILARIOUSLY, 84% of respondents stated that their dog was up-to-date on the Rabies vaccine (another 5% weren't sure.)
Oopsie! No matter...they just barge ahead with their pre-determined conclusions, and make a model of "Canine Vaccine Hesitancy" based on these responses anyway. BTW, I see no support for the claim that "40% believed canine vaccines were unsafe". The closest survey response is this one, at 30%:
> Most vaccines that dogs receive are not medically necessary
(You'll note that this is not a question about the Rabies vaccine. Just vaccines in general. And, of course, your guess is as good as mine what "most" means.)
The whole paper is almost designed to create a narrative of "vaccine hesitancy amongst pet owners" -- it asks some questions about how people feel about animal vaccine mandates and safety in general, then tries make a a model to predict negative responses (which they call "CVH"), and then they use that to predict opposition to mandatory vaccine policies.
At no point do they actually deal with the fact that the vast majority of their respondents, regardless of opinion, actually vaccinated their pet for Rabies. I don't know if Vaccine is a good journal, but this is just a classic example of a paper that should never have made it past peer review.
If 10% of people aren't vaccinating their dogs for rabies that's WAY too many, and it's a big problem.
Going to good ol' Wikipedia[0], "in countries where dogs commonly have the disease, more than 99% of rabies cases in humans are the direct result of dog bite. In the Americas, bat bites are the most common source of rabies infections in humans, and less than 5% of cases are from dogs." But the article is citing sources from 2011 - if TEN PERCENT of people aren't getting their dogs their rabies shots, that number is going to increase.
> If 10% of people aren't vaccinating their dogs for rabies that's WAY too many, and it's a big problem.
First of all, it's an internet survey of 2200 people. The data is garbage and you can't conclude anything from it. Huge error bars. I didn't lean on that point above, but it's fundamentally true.
Second, even assuming that the number is correct, who says it's a "big problem"? Rabies is not like the flu -- it requires direct, intimate contact for transmission. If the pets in question (like most pets) never meet a wild animal in their lives, the chances are high that it won't matter at all. Your main worry is dogs catching it from other dogs…but at a 90% vaccination rates and a rare event profile to begin with, that’s incredibly unlikely.
I grant you that it would be better to have 100% vaccination rates, but I doubt we’ve ever actually had that. Badness is relative.
Rabies is something it's hard for me to be highly rational about. It's 100% fatal after symptoms appear‡, and it's just an absolute horror show of a disease. Most states require you to vaccinate your pets, which is HOW the US became a place where less than 5% of rabies cases come from dogs.
You're right though, I don't know the exact threshold of unvaccinated pets where it really becomes a problem. And I also don't know how representative that survey is (I will admit I was waking up and didn't notice the source was an internet survey with a small sample size).
‡ I know, I know, they can put you in a coma and do some dramatic medical stuff and you might survive - but it's very expensive, of debatable efficacy, and even if it works you'll still probably have brain damage
> Still, even after all of Parmentier’s work, the French feared and hated potatoes. But Parmentier was undeterred. Determined to prove to his people that potatoes were, in fact, good, he started holding publicity stunts that included potatoes. He hosted stylish dinners featuring the maligned tuber, inviting such celebrities as Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier. Once, Parmentier made a bouquet of potato flowers to give to the King and Queen of France.
> With the publicity stunts failing to popularize potatoes, Parmentier tried a new tactic. King Louis XVI granted him a large plot of land at Sablons in 1781. Parmentier turned this land into a potato patch, then hired heavily armed guards to make a great show of guarding the potatoes. His thinking was that people would notice the guards and assume that potatoes must be valuable. Anything so fiercely guarded had to be worth stealing, right? To that end, Parmentier’s guards were given orders to allow thieves to get away with potatoes. If any enterprising potato bandits offered a bribe in exchange for potatoes, the guards were instructed to take the bribe, no matter how large or small.
> Sure enough, before too long, people began stealing Parmentier’s potatoes.
I've never known if the myth was true, but I've always wanted to try the trick with something to see if it works.
Have you talked to the kind of American voter who spouts antivax nonsense in the last decade? Because "these people <are incompetent at thing X> but somehow develop and practice complex medical opinions <that they heard on TV>" is literally true for millions.
Have you talked to average American dog owner? They leave their "kids" locked in tiny apartments alone for 10 hours a day, while working. Are not bothered if their "pet" is neurotic mess. If it becomes too annoying, it gets dumped into shelter or on streets. If it dies, it gets replaced in weeks!
In my experience, if you know a few people who are doing the same thing, that’s a sign of a trend. Jeff Bezos has this great quote: When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. I’ve also found that to be true. The people you know are different from the average person, but they’re not that different. On the other hand economic surveys and such can be very slow to respond to big changes.
This is not my experience anywhere in the US. We don't have a problem with stray dogs, rabies vaccination is ubiquitous, and I've never heard of anyone resisting it for their pets.
In my experience, if you get a dog you go to the government and pay the dog tax. The dog needs to have id, be chipped, and comes with a token you put on the leash. Part of the process is enforcing vaccination. If a dog has no such token, it’s considered a stray dog.
To so many issues, watching as a bystander from the outside, solutions exist, but the US seems to have a penchant for ignoring them and then claiming their problem is somehow not comparable to everyone else’s.
I have no idea about the answer to this idea, but I did for a time know a dog that belonged to a friend, whose behavior profile across the board matched almost perfectly with how I'd imagine autism expressing itself in a dog. (the dog, not my friend)
That specific dog made me just assume it was a possible thing, though I never verified with any veterinary website. It's worth a deeper look though.
Please stop posting this garbage. The US has 3 to 4000 animal cases per year and less than 10 human cases per year and the 6 cases is within the usual band. There’s no source, no detail, and the “14 potential outbreaks” are just business as usual with hotspots and alerts in those hotspots. The entire article is just a rabies faq stuffed with their ads.
> six people have died from rabies nationwide since September 2024, a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokesperson confirmed to CNN. In addition, the CDC is tracking 14 potential outbreaks in 20 states,
So is that high or low? It would be useful to know what the median and max cases per year has been over the last few decades.
14 potential doesn't sound that bad if we're investigating them out of an abundance of caution.
---
Edit: to semi-answer my own question, according to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/reported-rabies-deaths?ta... there were 7 deaths in 2011. So we are in a decade high, but with the numbers being so low in general seems like it might just be statistical noise.
In recent history, most all of the rabies cases in the U.S. have been from infections acquired in other countries. The fact that there are outbreaks at all is concerning and suggestive of an immunity tipping point being approached.
Chagas disease is the one that scares me, since it seems easy to contract and not know it. Rabies is definitely more lethal but hopefully you could recognize the exposure event and get treated.
Worth noting that many human cases of rabies infection involve bat bites, which (especially from vampire bats) can be hard to notice at all if they happened very suddenly or while you were asleep. The scarier thing is that once the virus is inside you, the arrival of symptoms can only mean that it's already too late for prophylaxis.
I remember the case of a woman in California, a teacher, who picked up a stunned bat that had accidentally flown into her school room one day. While she carried it over to the window to release it, the bat bit her without her even noticing. Weeks later she was diagnosed with rabies and died soon after. Only after the diagnosis did anyone make the connection to the incident with the little bat.
Edit: As for chagas, it's scary but not something worth blowing too far out of proportion either. I live in a country where chagas is endemic and even here it's exceptionally rare outside of deeply rural areas with lots of poverty and extremely low quality housing. The housing is a key transmission factor actually, since the bug tends to infect people with the parasite while they sleep, and it more easily enters barely-together rural shacks than it does properly built houses and apartments.
It is also true that 40% of dog owning households don't get their dogs vaccinated because they don't believe animal vaccines are medically necessary or effective. 37% of dog owners also believe vaccines can give their dog autism: https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/nearly-half-of-dog...
There is no scientific evidence vaccines give dogs or humans autism.
> It is also true that 40% of dog owning households don't get their dogs vaccinated because they don't believe animal vaccines are medically necessary or effective.
First of all, no, that's not what this says. The exact quote is:
> according to the survey results, nearly 40 percent of dog owners believe that canine vaccines are unsafe, more than 20 percent believe these vaccines are ineffective, and 30 percent consider them to be medically unnecessary.
In fact, when you look at the paper they're citing [1], they notably do not state if the respondent actually vaccinated their pet. Not sure why....
(EDIT: Actually, it's worse than that! I found a draft of the full text, and a full 84% of respondents vaccinated their pets for Rabies! [2] You can't make this stuff up. See my other comment for more [3]).
Second, it's based on a YouGov (aka, a web survey) of 2200 people:
> The survey was conducted between March 30 and April 10, 2023 among 2,200 dog owners who answered questions through the research sampling firm YouGov.
I would be very hesitant to draw any conclusions from this at all.
> Rabies can be found in many other wildlife species, including raccoons, skunks, coyotes and foxes
It's worth checking with your state's health or wildlife department to learn which of those may have rabies in your state.
There are enough geographical barriers to divide many of those kinds of animals into multiple groups groups that are have either no contact with other groups or only rare contact. You might say have two distinct populations separated by a high mountain range. You can then have a group on one side where rabies is endemic and a group on the other side with no rabies.
A great example of isolated populations is Washington state, where no wild terrestrial mammal has ever been documented with rabies.
Some still freak out on Nextdoor if they see a Washington raccoon wander through their neighborhood in the daytime, posting warnings to keep children and pets inside to avoid rabies. They are partly spooked by merely seeing the raccoon because they know raccoons are nocturnal and so figure something must be wrong with it to make it come out in the daytime. They've often heard raccoons mentioned as rabies carries so jump to that as the explanation.
Raccoons are mostly nocturnal, but they will come out in the daytime to look for food if they aren't able to find enough food at night. In a place where the raccoons are barely getting by they may be out a lot in the daytime and people would get used to it. But at least around here they seem to be fine most of the year. It's only when they are pregnant or have young that they need to come out in the daytime, and that's not often enough for people to get used to seeing them.
Scary. This site has useful information about rabies and the treatment but other articles say more about the outbreaks. So far there is no pattern. It spans the entire country, east coast to west coast to Alaska. The animals involved have no pattern either.
The short-term effects of relaxing vaccine requirements won’t be obvious right away, but the consequences will likely compound over time. I don’t know how much time of lower coverage it will take before we start to see measles, rabies, or others become regular problems again.
If you’re traveling, it’s more important than ever to make sure your own vaccines are fully up to date. And if you’re in a high-risk group, the US may not be the safest destination in the near future.
Rabies vaccines have never been required. It is disingenuous to even imply otherwise. Humans are only given a rabies vaccine if there is evidence of exposure. Exaggerating the issue just gives average people reasons to disbelieve you.
Turning vaccines into quasi-religious totems is counter-productive. It should be a pure cost-benefit analysis. I am way more vaccinated than most people, side effects of my interesting career, but I am under no delusions that much of it is not an almost total waste as a matter of science.
Measles, yes. Rabies, lol no. If you conflate them people will rightly not trust you.
> The short-term effects of relaxing vaccine requirements won’t be obvious right away, but the consequences will likely compound over time. I don’t know how much time of lower coverage it will take before we start to see measles, rabies, or others become regular problems again.
Rabies vaccines have never been required. You're only expected to get them after being bitten by a potentially-rabid animal.
> The short-term effects of relaxing vaccine requirements won’t be obvious right away, but the consequences will likely compound over time. I don’t know how much time of lower coverage it will take before we start to see measles, rabies, or others become regular problems again.
Whatever you think of the current HHS leadership, pet dogs and wild animals are not getting rabies from unvaccinated humans.
Citation absolutely required for that claim. Even ignoring the fact in order to get your pet licensed anywhere in the US you have to vaccinate it for Rabies, the transmission chain doesn't work that way.
When people get Rabies, they get it overwhelmingly from wild animals (or stray dogs in some parts of the world).
>In the United States ... contact with infected bats is the leading cause of human rabies deaths.
> The same goes for people planning to ... explore caves in regions where rabid bats have been.
>The clearest example is someone who has been bitten by a wild dog, bat, fox, raccoon or other animal known to carry rabies. If someone had direct contact with a bat — for instance, waking up to find a bat in the room — this is also considered a possible exposure unless a bite or scratch can be definitively ruled out. ... If you find a dead bat, do not throw it away. Do not touch it or allow other people or pets to touch it. Instead, call animal control so that the bat can be tested.
>In addition, try to prevent bats from getting inside your home through windows, chimneys or other holes.
Here's an article from late August with some detail [1], including the affected states: New York, Massachusetts, Alaska, Arizona, California, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, North Carolina, Oregon and Vermont. I can't find anything about it on the CDC website though.
Edited to add another charming detail from the article: "A 2023 study published in the journal Vaccine found in a nationally representative sample of Americans that nearly 40% believed canine vaccines were unsafe and 37% believed that vaccines could lead their dogs to develop cognitive issues, such as autism."
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/rabies-outbreaks-...
It's absolutely scary that the CDC hasn't published anything about it. They were the ultimate source of epidemiological information, weren't they? We knew this was coming. But this is the clearest sign yet that we have entered the medical dark ages.
Yes, the medical dark ages. Not the metaphorical kind either, but the kind where people die foaming at the mouth because their neighbor decided a rabies shot might cause dog autism. The CDC has apparently chosen the new strategy of “if we ignore it, maybe it will go away,” which worked wonders in the 14th century. Soon, every PTA meeting will double as a plague ward while Etsy sellers crank out crystal collars to protect your doodle from brain inflammation. The irony is perfect: the world’s richest country, armed with billion-dollar labs, yet losing a fight our grandparents solved with a needle and some common sense. When your local ER is triaging between toddlers bitten by strays and adults bitten by TikTok misinformation, maybe then people will realize the dark ages don’t arrive with torches and pitchforks. They arrive with Facebook posts and silence from the institutions that should have known better.
I thought perhaps you were joking but it turns out people are also hesitant to vaccinate their pets.
""" About 37 percent of dog owners also believe that canine vaccination could cause their dogs to develop autism, even though there is no scientific data that validates this risk for animals or humans. """
https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/nearly-half-of-dog...
> I thought perhaps you were joking but it turns out people are also hesitant to vaccinate their pets.
Incorrect. Of the respondents to that paper's survey, 84% said that their pets were fully vaccinated for Rabies.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45329845
How does your highlighted quote refute injidup‘s claim?
I didn't "highlight a quote". I showed that the entire paper is invalid. They use poor methodology and base their model of "vaccine hesitance" on a population with self-admitted high rates of vaccination.
[flagged]
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/rabies-outbreaks-...
CDC did publish something. The idea that it's "absolutely scary" is hilarious when you didn't do any research.
I was replying to someone, not attempting to refute them.
> Edited to add another charming detail from the article: "A 2023 study published in the journal Vaccine found in a nationally representative sample of Americans that nearly 40% believed canine vaccines were unsafe and 37% believed that vaccines could lead their dogs to develop cognitive issues, such as autism."
You should always go to the primary source.
Here's the Vaccine paper [1,2]. I don't say this often about papers, but this is total crap. They did a YouGov survey of 2200 people, and HILARIOUSLY, 84% of respondents stated that their dog was up-to-date on the Rabies vaccine (another 5% weren't sure.)
Oopsie! No matter...they just barge ahead with their pre-determined conclusions, and make a model of "Canine Vaccine Hesitancy" based on these responses anyway. BTW, I see no support for the claim that "40% believed canine vaccines were unsafe". The closest survey response is this one, at 30%:
> Most vaccines that dogs receive are not medically necessary
(You'll note that this is not a question about the Rabies vaccine. Just vaccines in general. And, of course, your guess is as good as mine what "most" means.)
The whole paper is almost designed to create a narrative of "vaccine hesitancy amongst pet owners" -- it asks some questions about how people feel about animal vaccine mandates and safety in general, then tries make a a model to predict negative responses (which they call "CVH"), and then they use that to predict opposition to mandatory vaccine policies.
At no point do they actually deal with the fact that the vast majority of their respondents, regardless of opinion, actually vaccinated their pet for Rabies. I don't know if Vaccine is a good journal, but this is just a classic example of a paper that should never have made it past peer review.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02644...
[2] (full text of draft here, where you can see the data) https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/qmbkv.html
If 10% of people aren't vaccinating their dogs for rabies that's WAY too many, and it's a big problem.
Going to good ol' Wikipedia[0], "in countries where dogs commonly have the disease, more than 99% of rabies cases in humans are the direct result of dog bite. In the Americas, bat bites are the most common source of rabies infections in humans, and less than 5% of cases are from dogs." But the article is citing sources from 2011 - if TEN PERCENT of people aren't getting their dogs their rabies shots, that number is going to increase.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies
> If 10% of people aren't vaccinating their dogs for rabies that's WAY too many, and it's a big problem.
First of all, it's an internet survey of 2200 people. The data is garbage and you can't conclude anything from it. Huge error bars. I didn't lean on that point above, but it's fundamentally true.
Second, even assuming that the number is correct, who says it's a "big problem"? Rabies is not like the flu -- it requires direct, intimate contact for transmission. If the pets in question (like most pets) never meet a wild animal in their lives, the chances are high that it won't matter at all. Your main worry is dogs catching it from other dogs…but at a 90% vaccination rates and a rare event profile to begin with, that’s incredibly unlikely.
I grant you that it would be better to have 100% vaccination rates, but I doubt we’ve ever actually had that. Badness is relative.
Rabies is something it's hard for me to be highly rational about. It's 100% fatal after symptoms appear‡, and it's just an absolute horror show of a disease. Most states require you to vaccinate your pets, which is HOW the US became a place where less than 5% of rabies cases come from dogs.
You're right though, I don't know the exact threshold of unvaccinated pets where it really becomes a problem. And I also don't know how representative that survey is (I will admit I was waking up and didn't notice the source was an internet survey with a small sample size).
‡ I know, I know, they can put you in a coma and do some dramatic medical stuff and you might survive - but it's very expensive, of debatable efficacy, and even if it works you'll still probably have brain damage
We should rebrand vaccines as "freedom shots" and get AOC to play along and call them problematic.
The potato trick.
https://www.farmersalmanac.com/parmentier-made-potatoes-popu...
> Still, even after all of Parmentier’s work, the French feared and hated potatoes. But Parmentier was undeterred. Determined to prove to his people that potatoes were, in fact, good, he started holding publicity stunts that included potatoes. He hosted stylish dinners featuring the maligned tuber, inviting such celebrities as Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier. Once, Parmentier made a bouquet of potato flowers to give to the King and Queen of France.
> With the publicity stunts failing to popularize potatoes, Parmentier tried a new tactic. King Louis XVI granted him a large plot of land at Sablons in 1781. Parmentier turned this land into a potato patch, then hired heavily armed guards to make a great show of guarding the potatoes. His thinking was that people would notice the guards and assume that potatoes must be valuable. Anything so fiercely guarded had to be worth stealing, right? To that end, Parmentier’s guards were given orders to allow thieves to get away with potatoes. If any enterprising potato bandits offered a bribe in exchange for potatoes, the guards were instructed to take the bribe, no matter how large or small.
> Sure enough, before too long, people began stealing Parmentier’s potatoes.
I've never known if the myth was true, but I've always wanted to try the trick with something to see if it works.
Maybe a more succinct and modern example: don’t put something on the curb with “free!”, put “$50!” And it’ll get stolen in no time
Honestly, this is just stupid in just such a way that it might work well for the right kind of person. I'm not at all joking.
In my experience dog owners just do not care. Vaccine costs time and money.
The same with training. Most dog owners are just lazy, and do not care. Adding some sophisticated explanations on top of that is pointless.
Well, in my experience, "in my experience" anecdotes are lazy. Though, I'm sure this is generally more true for some breeds more so than others.
Those people do not care about basic hygiene or safety, but somehow develop and practise complex medical opinions!
Have you talked to the kind of American voter who spouts antivax nonsense in the last decade? Because "these people <are incompetent at thing X> but somehow develop and practice complex medical opinions <that they heard on TV>" is literally true for millions.
Have you talked to average American dog owner? They leave their "kids" locked in tiny apartments alone for 10 hours a day, while working. Are not bothered if their "pet" is neurotic mess. If it becomes too annoying, it gets dumped into shelter or on streets. If it dies, it gets replaced in weeks!
You are really giving dog owners too much agency!
We get it, you’re depressed. Most dog owners like their dogs and take care of them to the best of their ability.
> Well, in my experience, "in my experience" anecdotes are lazy
In this case this reinforces their argument
In my experience, if you know a few people who are doing the same thing, that’s a sign of a trend. Jeff Bezos has this great quote: When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. I’ve also found that to be true. The people you know are different from the average person, but they’re not that different. On the other hand economic surveys and such can be very slow to respond to big changes.
This is not my experience anywhere in the US. We don't have a problem with stray dogs, rabies vaccination is ubiquitous, and I've never heard of anyone resisting it for their pets.
In my experience, if you get a dog you go to the government and pay the dog tax. The dog needs to have id, be chipped, and comes with a token you put on the leash. Part of the process is enforcing vaccination. If a dog has no such token, it’s considered a stray dog.
To so many issues, watching as a bystander from the outside, solutions exist, but the US seems to have a penchant for ignoring them and then claiming their problem is somehow not comparable to everyone else’s.
[flagged]
Is autism a thing for dogs? I have literally never thought about this but I guess it could be a thing.
There is probably some analogous disability, but I doubt there is anything identical.
Socially awkward dog prefers not to dog.
Social awkwardness and autism are not the same thing.
I have no idea about the answer to this idea, but I did for a time know a dog that belonged to a friend, whose behavior profile across the board matched almost perfectly with how I'd imagine autism expressing itself in a dog. (the dog, not my friend)
That specific dog made me just assume it was a possible thing, though I never verified with any veterinary website. It's worth a deeper look though.
Please stop posting this garbage. The US has 3 to 4000 animal cases per year and less than 10 human cases per year and the 6 cases is within the usual band. There’s no source, no detail, and the “14 potential outbreaks” are just business as usual with hotspots and alerts in those hotspots. The entire article is just a rabies faq stuffed with their ads.
Actual CDC data: https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/php/protecting-public-health/inde...
I wouldn't trust US health data nowadays.
> six people have died from rabies nationwide since September 2024, a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokesperson confirmed to CNN. In addition, the CDC is tracking 14 potential outbreaks in 20 states,
So is that high or low? It would be useful to know what the median and max cases per year has been over the last few decades.
14 potential doesn't sound that bad if we're investigating them out of an abundance of caution.
---
Edit: to semi-answer my own question, according to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/reported-rabies-deaths?ta... there were 7 deaths in 2011. So we are in a decade high, but with the numbers being so low in general seems like it might just be statistical noise.
According to the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, "about 1-3 human rabies cases are reported in the US each year": https://www.nfid.org/infectious-disease/rabies/
I would say that 6 deaths is definitely high compared to 1-3 cases.
1-3 cases is nearly equivalent to 1-3 deaths.
Rabies is almost 100% lethal after symptoms develop, and we don’t count people exposed who don’t develop symptoms as a rabies case.
In recent history, most all of the rabies cases in the U.S. have been from infections acquired in other countries. The fact that there are outbreaks at all is concerning and suggestive of an immunity tipping point being approached.
From the related articles: https://www.accuweather.com/en/health-wellness/kissing-bug-d...
Chagas disease is the one that scares me, since it seems easy to contract and not know it. Rabies is definitely more lethal but hopefully you could recognize the exposure event and get treated.
Worth noting that many human cases of rabies infection involve bat bites, which (especially from vampire bats) can be hard to notice at all if they happened very suddenly or while you were asleep. The scarier thing is that once the virus is inside you, the arrival of symptoms can only mean that it's already too late for prophylaxis.
I remember the case of a woman in California, a teacher, who picked up a stunned bat that had accidentally flown into her school room one day. While she carried it over to the window to release it, the bat bit her without her even noticing. Weeks later she was diagnosed with rabies and died soon after. Only after the diagnosis did anyone make the connection to the incident with the little bat.
Just found a link, to confirm I'd remember the essential details right. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-teacher-dies-bitten-...
Edit: As for chagas, it's scary but not something worth blowing too far out of proportion either. I live in a country where chagas is endemic and even here it's exceptionally rare outside of deeply rural areas with lots of poverty and extremely low quality housing. The housing is a key transmission factor actually, since the bug tends to infect people with the parasite while they sleep, and it more easily enters barely-together rural shacks than it does properly built houses and apartments.
A lot of intellectually lazy comments on this post.
Yes, there is a rise in rabies cases. In 2021 we experienced 2008 levels. The rise mostly has to do with domestic animal contact with bats: https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/media/releases/2022/p010...
It is also true that 40% of dog owning households don't get their dogs vaccinated because they don't believe animal vaccines are medically necessary or effective. 37% of dog owners also believe vaccines can give their dog autism: https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/nearly-half-of-dog...
There is no scientific evidence vaccines give dogs or humans autism.
> It is also true that 40% of dog owning households don't get their dogs vaccinated because they don't believe animal vaccines are medically necessary or effective.
First of all, no, that's not what this says. The exact quote is:
> according to the survey results, nearly 40 percent of dog owners believe that canine vaccines are unsafe, more than 20 percent believe these vaccines are ineffective, and 30 percent consider them to be medically unnecessary.
In fact, when you look at the paper they're citing [1], they notably do not state if the respondent actually vaccinated their pet. Not sure why....
(EDIT: Actually, it's worse than that! I found a draft of the full text, and a full 84% of respondents vaccinated their pets for Rabies! [2] You can't make this stuff up. See my other comment for more [3]).
Second, it's based on a YouGov (aka, a web survey) of 2200 people:
> The survey was conducted between March 30 and April 10, 2023 among 2,200 dog owners who answered questions through the research sampling firm YouGov.
I would be very hesitant to draw any conclusions from this at all.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02644...
[2] https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/qmbkv.html
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45329845
Are the states a secret or something? Why say that and not list the locations?
> Rabies can be found in many other wildlife species, including raccoons, skunks, coyotes and foxes
It's worth checking with your state's health or wildlife department to learn which of those may have rabies in your state.
There are enough geographical barriers to divide many of those kinds of animals into multiple groups groups that are have either no contact with other groups or only rare contact. You might say have two distinct populations separated by a high mountain range. You can then have a group on one side where rabies is endemic and a group on the other side with no rabies.
A great example of isolated populations is Washington state, where no wild terrestrial mammal has ever been documented with rabies.
Some still freak out on Nextdoor if they see a Washington raccoon wander through their neighborhood in the daytime, posting warnings to keep children and pets inside to avoid rabies. They are partly spooked by merely seeing the raccoon because they know raccoons are nocturnal and so figure something must be wrong with it to make it come out in the daytime. They've often heard raccoons mentioned as rabies carries so jump to that as the explanation.
Raccoons are mostly nocturnal, but they will come out in the daytime to look for food if they aren't able to find enough food at night. In a place where the raccoons are barely getting by they may be out a lot in the daytime and people would get used to it. But at least around here they seem to be fine most of the year. It's only when they are pregnant or have young that they need to come out in the daytime, and that's not often enough for people to get used to seeing them.
Scary. This site has useful information about rabies and the treatment but other articles say more about the outbreaks. So far there is no pattern. It spans the entire country, east coast to west coast to Alaska. The animals involved have no pattern either.
Rising global temperatures will likely lead to increased pathogen activity.
Curious why that is?
The short-term effects of relaxing vaccine requirements won’t be obvious right away, but the consequences will likely compound over time. I don’t know how much time of lower coverage it will take before we start to see measles, rabies, or others become regular problems again.
If you’re traveling, it’s more important than ever to make sure your own vaccines are fully up to date. And if you’re in a high-risk group, the US may not be the safest destination in the near future.
Rabies vaccines have never been required. It is disingenuous to even imply otherwise. Humans are only given a rabies vaccine if there is evidence of exposure. Exaggerating the issue just gives average people reasons to disbelieve you.
Turning vaccines into quasi-religious totems is counter-productive. It should be a pure cost-benefit analysis. I am way more vaccinated than most people, side effects of my interesting career, but I am under no delusions that much of it is not an almost total waste as a matter of science.
Measles, yes. Rabies, lol no. If you conflate them people will rightly not trust you.
> The short-term effects of relaxing vaccine requirements won’t be obvious right away, but the consequences will likely compound over time. I don’t know how much time of lower coverage it will take before we start to see measles, rabies, or others become regular problems again.
Rabies vaccines have never been required. You're only expected to get them after being bitten by a potentially-rabid animal.
Some countries require them for dogs.
> The short-term effects of relaxing vaccine requirements won’t be obvious right away, but the consequences will likely compound over time. I don’t know how much time of lower coverage it will take before we start to see measles, rabies, or others become regular problems again.
Whatever you think of the current HHS leadership, pet dogs and wild animals are not getting rabies from unvaccinated humans.
But they get it from unvaccinated dogs? The point is that many Americans don’t want to use any vaccines anymore even for their pets
Citation absolutely required for that claim. Even ignoring the fact in order to get your pet licensed anywhere in the US you have to vaccinate it for Rabies, the transmission chain doesn't work that way.
When people get Rabies, they get it overwhelmingly from wild animals (or stray dogs in some parts of the world).
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Making America Gnaw Again
I'm surprised they don't mention bats, every summer night they fly within a foot of my head and some poor guy died on Vancouver Island,
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/rabies-death...
They mention bats multiple times in the article
>In the United States ... contact with infected bats is the leading cause of human rabies deaths.
> The same goes for people planning to ... explore caves in regions where rabid bats have been.
>The clearest example is someone who has been bitten by a wild dog, bat, fox, raccoon or other animal known to carry rabies. If someone had direct contact with a bat — for instance, waking up to find a bat in the room — this is also considered a possible exposure unless a bite or scratch can be definitively ruled out. ... If you find a dead bat, do not throw it away. Do not touch it or allow other people or pets to touch it. Instead, call animal control so that the bat can be tested.
>In addition, try to prevent bats from getting inside your home through windows, chimneys or other holes.
This must be an LLM/bot account as bats were listed multiple times throughout the article...