How does Rabies factor into SS?

[sylvie]

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/01/29/central.park.rabies/index.html?hpt=Sbin

If TSHTF I could easily see NYC residents hitting that park for meals, eating anything that moves, which will now include animals carrying Rabies.

I live in a rural area that got hit hard by Rabies a few years ago. So hard that the health dept and ODNR had a rabies task force van permanently parked at the township road dept parking lot for over a year.
We used to have old timers from West Virginia up here hunting raccoons and fox but won't now because of the Rabies, which is still prevalent and continues to spread to other towns towards Cleveland. This is despite the heavily implemented vaccination program, distributed from planes and on foot; the same that the article thinks will work.

In October a co-worker woke to find a raccoon on her kitchen counter eating a loaf of bread. It tore out the window screen to get in. She shooed it out with a broom and we doubt it was rabid, but still!

Has anyone given this consideration while proceeding to their SS lifestyle goals? My area has been forced to tread carefully, because we're already there.

 

[Wifezilla]

The plague is more of a problem out here. Or West Nile

 

[SKR8PN]

sylvie......where are you located in Ohio? I am in Mansfield and this is the first I have heard of this problem.......

 

[sylvie]

SKR8PN- I pm'd you the Rabies map.

 

[Wolf-Kim]

Never really thought how rabies would factor into SS. I guess we would treat it how we would treat it SS or without.

If it acts weird shoot it.

If it acts normal, cook it thoroughly and no worries.

The only real difference in an end of the world scenario, would be how to deal with people who are supposedly infected. Perhaps we shouldn't play that scenario, because honestly, we wouldn't know how we would react in such a predicament.

-Kim

ETA: Meant to say "shouldn't" and not should.

 

[patandchickens]

What Wolf-Kim said. Anything you observed for a while before you killed and et it, and it seemed normal, is exceedingly exceedingly unlikely to give you rabies. Anything acting funny, or acquired in circumstances where you couldn't observe it (e.g. hit by car or whatever the post-apocalyptic version of that would be) should be considered real questionable (i.e. off-limits unless you are starving to death). In principle, thorough "well-done" cooking kills the rabies virus, but in practice there is a limit to how much you prolly want to push your luck.

The bigger issue is probably not so much what you eat, as what's wandering around potentially going to come after you. There is quite a lot of rabies in wildlife populations in some portions of the U.S. and if people are no longer vaccinating housepets for rabies, I would expect the situation to fairly quickly approach what you have in the Third World, where rabies kills quite a lot of people (esp. rabies transmitted by stray or feral dogs).


Pat

 

[xpc]

Poor Old Yeller he can't be a friend or a meal. A few years back in Fond du Lac we had one of the only known cases in the world that human rabies was cured - it in no way should be taken lightly, as death is usually the only outcome.

 

[Beekissed]

One thing I was always told about rabies outbreaks was to never leave bowls of water out for your pets at night, as rabied animals are extremely thirsty in the last stages and their saliva transmits the virus. This is also how livestock can become infected, from the water troughs.

 

[meriruka]

I had a rabid racoon (I think). Even for a city girl, it was easy to see this thing had issues. It was 5 PM in August (broad daylight) I heard a weird hissing noise and looked up to see it 20 feet away and coming right for me. It was staggering a bit and it looked disoriented and glassy eyed. I ran into the house for the gun and it was standing by the door when I came back. So, I opened the window and put it out of it's misery and to be honest, because it scared the heck out of me.

I did not have it tested, and I'm no expert on wildlife or rabies symptoms, but racoons should not be hissing & staggering after humans and during the daytime.

 

[Wolf-Kim]

Oh the stories about rabid animals are just aweful. I remember hearing about one where there was a rabid fox that was running around the neighborhood trying to get into houses. Repeatedly running into doors and windows. Unfortunately, it found a house with a doggy door and the family came out of their bedrooms to a rabid and highly aggressive fox in their livingroom. Luckily for the family, they had a couple of large dogs who intercepted the fox when it charged them and they were able to get out of the house and call police and animal control. The dogs lived to tell the tale and nobody was hurt.

Another story that was fairly recent was a woman was jogging and a fox lunged out of the brush and attached itself to her arm. She could NOT get it off and ended up jogging 2 miles to her car with it hanging from her arm. At her car she was able to beat it off with her trunk door and lock it in her trunk and waited for animal control to show up. When animal control got there and went to get the animal with a control stick, it lunged out the moment they popped the trunk and bit the animal control officer. Also lunging at police officers on the scene. They were able to eventually detain and destroy the animal, but those were two very unhappy people getting the rabies series!

One of my highschool classmates would come to school and tell of rabid fox in his area. He said you would hear them in the middle of the night at the back sliding glass door. You could sit there and watch them through the glass and they repeated threw themselves at the door.

Another local story from some years ago took place at a small lake that people flock to in the summer to swim. It is right in the middle of town. The kids were swimming and adults were lounging on the beach area and the kids started screaming and trying to get out of the water. Nobody knew what was going on, it was mass panic. Kids were climbing out of the water with blood on them. Finally they saw the culprit, it was a rabid otter. Which I thought was really weird, because aren't rabid animals hydrophobic?

Scary, scary stuff.

-Kim