AI transcript
0:00:07 Puskin.
0:00:12 Hey, it’s Jacob.
0:00:18 If you want more podcasts about creative people solving high stakes technical problems, I’ve
0:00:20 got good news for you.
0:00:24 A new season of a show called Incubation is out now.
0:00:26 Incubation is a show about viruses.
0:00:31 I’m the host of the show, and the people I interviewed for this season have been full
0:00:35 of insight and delight, and I have learned a ton.
0:00:40 So, basically, I think if you like what’s your problem, you will like Incubation.
0:00:45 Here is the first episode of the new season of the show, and if you do like it, you can
0:00:50 listen to more episodes wherever you’re listening to this.
0:00:53 Here’s a story about rabies in three sentences.
0:00:55 You get bitten by a rabid animal.
0:00:59 You lose control of your mind, and then you die.
0:01:05 So, it is not surprising that rabies terrified humanity for thousands of years.
0:01:07 Why did you write a book about rabies?
0:01:14 Gosh, I have always thought rabies was so interesting in terms of its biology, the
0:01:20 way it hijacks the brain to ensure that it’ll continue its own spread, the way it affects
0:01:24 the relationship between people and animals, which, since I’m a veterinarian, is pretty
0:01:26 central to my life.
0:01:32 Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and the co-author with Bill Wasik of “Rabid,” a cultural history
0:01:35 of the world’s most diabolical virus.
0:01:39 I should mention that Monica also happens to be my neighbor and a friend of mine.
0:01:47 I think the stories that my rabid Google alert turns up every week of, you know, bobcats
0:01:54 like coming into a bar and like assaulting someone at a pool table or raccoons attacking
0:02:00 people’s trucks, all that stuff, is just really interesting and scary and the stuff
0:02:01 of nightmares.
0:02:05 But I love that science has an answer for all of that.
0:02:09 In the developed world, almost nobody gets rabies anymore.
0:02:12 In the United States, it’s fewer than 10 people a year.
0:02:16 Even our dogs are safe from the disease for the most part.
0:02:20 And the reason for this, the reason we don’t have to worry that every barking dog we see
0:02:25 might bite us and kill us goes back to one of the most important scientists in the history
0:02:31 of both viruses and vaccines, Louis Pasteur.
0:02:35 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is Incubation, a show about viruses.
0:02:38 We’re delighted to be launching season two today.
0:02:42 We have lots more viruses to talk about this season, and we’re starting with rabies.
0:02:46 In the first half of the show, we’ll be talking to Monica about rabies and the work of Louis
0:02:47 Pasteur.
0:02:51 In the second half of the show, we’ll talk to a scientist who’s fighting rabies in
0:02:55 wildlife in a really surprising way.
0:02:59 Hey, everyone.
0:03:02 It’s Mary Harris, host of Slate’s Daily News Podcast, What Next?
0:03:05 It’s been a long road to election day.
0:03:06 How you doing?
0:03:12 We’ve had crazy cat ladies, coconut trees, not to mention a little last minute candidate
0:03:13 swap.
0:03:14 The polling indicates where they’re sleeping.
0:03:18 I think viewers saw something other than what they were expecting.
0:03:21 In an election that seems as close as this one does, you know, any one of these little
0:03:23 factors can matter so much.
0:03:29 But after all that, here we are at the end of the road, or maybe it’s just the beginning.
0:03:35 And What Next has got you covered every step of the way for November 5th and the aftermath.
0:03:40 We’ll have all the deep insights and tongue-in-cheek political analysis you know and love from
0:03:41 Slate.
0:03:49 So don’t miss out, follow, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
0:03:50 So let’s talk about rabies.
0:03:51 What is rabies?
0:03:55 So rabies is an RNA virus.
0:04:02 It is special because it is transmitted through bites primarily.
0:04:07 Unlike the sort of transmission pattern we see with other viruses, in rabies at the
0:04:13 site of the bite, the virus is looking to interact with a nerve.
0:04:18 And once it has engaged the nerve, it kind of ratchets its way up the central nervous
0:04:24 system from the bite site through peripheral nerves up into the spine and from the spine
0:04:26 up into the brain.
0:04:27 It takes a while.
0:04:29 It’s a slow, slow process.
0:04:31 It’s like a centimeter a day or something.
0:04:38 There is a real sort of relationship between how far away the bite is from the brain and
0:04:43 how long it takes to develop rabies, although it’s not strict.
0:04:49 And it does mean that if you’re bitten on the face, you are likely to come down with
0:04:52 rabies faster than if you’re bitten on the toe.
0:04:57 And not every bite from a rabid animal will result in transmission.
0:05:01 It’s something like 20% to give me a round number.
0:05:07 And once the virus does make it into the brain, you’re going to develop symptoms of rabies.
0:05:11 They’re horrible and then you’re going to die.
0:05:15 It’s practically speaking 100% fatal, really rotten.
0:05:20 And the way it works too, which is pretty horrifying if you think about it, is it’s
0:05:24 hijacking the brain to ensure that it’s going to be spread to another individual.
0:05:25 What do you mean?
0:05:32 So especially in the species it’s adapted to, let’s say dog rabies.
0:05:39 In the dog, it is going to stimulate parts of the brain that kind of rev up that dog’s
0:05:45 sort of social emotional state, make it much more prone to violence and biting incidents
0:05:51 with other dogs so that meanwhile it’s being secreted in the saliva, it’s really increasing
0:05:55 the likelihood that it’s going to make it into another dog and continue its life cycle.
0:05:57 Which is kind of amazing, right?
0:06:05 It’s just a virus and it’s essentially evolved to change the behavior of this complex mammal
0:06:09 to make it bite other mammals so that the virus will spread.
0:06:11 That is a wild feat of evolution.
0:06:12 Yeah.
0:06:13 Yeah.
0:06:16 It’s really, really scary.
0:06:22 In places where humans are frequently in contact with rabid animals, the sort of behavioral
0:06:29 changes that occur in the human rabies victim are also really messy.
0:06:34 Human with rabies might not actively try to bite you unless they’re a little kid.
0:06:38 They might punch you in the nose or just scream curses at you.
0:06:41 In general, people become more hostile, more violent.
0:06:42 Yeah.
0:06:43 Or sexed up.
0:06:44 Uh-huh.
0:06:45 Or more id.
0:06:46 Yeah.
0:06:47 Terrifying.
0:06:50 You’re being attacked by your own brain.
0:06:54 Somehow your own thoughts are attacking you.
0:06:55 Yeah.
0:06:56 Yeah.
0:07:04 You talk with respect to that in the book about kind of rabies and mythology, right?
0:07:07 Rabies and werewolves, rabies and vampires.
0:07:08 Tell me about that.
0:07:14 There’s at least a deep resonance between these stories of a sort of contagious, you
0:07:20 know, contagious zombie-ism or werewolf-ism or vampirism, where the bite, the bite, apparently.
0:07:21 A bat.
0:07:22 Yeah.
0:07:23 And there’s the association with bats and vampires.
0:07:30 And both, and both bats and wolves are historical vectors of rabies, just to be clear.
0:07:32 So this is kind of rabies.
0:07:35 It’s this ancient disease.
0:07:41 It is terrifying where crazed animals bite people and turn people into crazed animals
0:07:42 who then die.
0:07:47 It’s basically the state of play for rabies forever.
0:07:53 And then onto the stage of history walks our hero, Louis Pasteur.
0:07:55 Tell me about Pasteur.
0:08:00 Most folks know at least a little bit about Louis Pasteur because he had a long scientific
0:08:01 career.
0:08:05 He was trained as a physicist and chemist.
0:08:14 And he grew into more of a microbiological concentration in his work along the way he
0:08:16 established germ theory.
0:08:17 Yes.
0:08:20 That people thought was like a crazy idea.
0:08:24 And this is like mid to late 1800s, right?
0:08:28 And the world already had the smallpox vaccine at this point.
0:08:32 But I do feel like it’s worth remembering here that that was sort of this lucky break,
0:08:33 right?
0:08:36 Where like there just happened to be this mild disease, cowpox that made people immune
0:08:40 to this terrible disease, to smallpox.
0:08:44 And Pasteur, as you write in the book, he decides that he’s going to apply this germ
0:08:46 theory to vaccines, right?
0:08:49 He’s actually going to use science to create a vaccine.
0:08:52 So tell us about that.
0:08:59 What Louis Pasteur sought to do and succeeded in doing for the first time ever is manipulating
0:09:06 microbes to sort of move them away from their wild state into an attenuated weakened state
0:09:09 and induce immunity using those.
0:09:10 Right.
0:09:11 So, okay.
0:09:16 So Pasteur, he develops a few animal vaccines in this way and then he decides that the first
0:09:21 human vaccine he’s going to make is going to be a rabies vaccine, you know, a vaccine
0:09:24 for this terrifying disease.
0:09:26 So what does he actually have to do?
0:09:34 So because there’s no way to grow rabies inside of a test tube, he had to maintain a population
0:09:35 of rabid animals in his lab.
0:09:36 Terrifying.
0:09:37 Yeah, awful.
0:09:41 I mean, really gruesome and scary for the people he worked with.
0:09:48 They would harvest the saliva and introduce it into more dogs or into rabbits.
0:09:51 How do you harvest the saliva from a rabid dog?
0:09:52 Really carefully.
0:09:53 Yeah.
0:09:54 Right.
0:09:55 I walked into that.
0:09:56 But yeah, involving like a pipette.
0:09:57 Oh my God.
0:09:58 Yeah.
0:09:59 In the mouth of a rabid dog.
0:10:00 Yeah.
0:10:01 And it’s 1850.
0:10:02 I’m going to die.
0:10:03 Yeah.
0:10:04 I’m afraid.
0:10:06 So you’ve got step one, find the nasty disease.
0:10:11 Step two, seemingly the harder part, turn that nasty disease into a thing that will induce
0:10:13 immunity without causing disease.
0:10:14 Right.
0:10:15 They can’t see the microbe.
0:10:17 They know it’s in the nervous tissue.
0:10:26 So they start dissecting out nervous tissue from animals with rabies, specifically rabbits.
0:10:33 And they aged it, they age the tissue in a sort of desiccating tray and determined that
0:10:36 with sufficient aging, it weakens it.
0:10:39 Just leave it sitting on the shelf for a while.
0:10:40 Yeah.
0:10:44 Except they ultimately arrived at a method that was a lot more complex.
0:10:51 They had a sort of, well, a whole sort of assembly line of tissues at various stages
0:10:52 of aging.
0:10:53 Okay.
0:10:56 So you know, you’ve got your rabbit spinal cord over here that’s aged 14 days and here’s
0:10:59 a 13 day one and etc.
0:11:05 The ones that are oldest are least virulent, the ones that are newest are most virulent.
0:11:08 And too dangerous to put right into a person right out of the gate.
0:11:13 So they start with an injection of the longest aged nervous tissue.
0:11:14 The weakest.
0:11:15 The weakest one.
0:11:16 Yeah.
0:11:21 And then over, I think it was 10 days, the initial protocol, they inject 13 injections
0:11:26 with progressively stronger, that is newer tissue.
0:11:32 And so is the basic idea like the weakest one induces some immune response so that you can
0:11:37 then tolerate a slightly stronger one and you’re kind of going up a staircase of immunity?
0:11:38 That’s how we developed it.
0:11:43 And then of course, today we just have a single strength rabies vaccine in use.
0:11:47 So his method wasn’t the only way to induce immunity, but it’s, you know, they were dealing
0:11:50 with a 100% fatal disease.
0:11:53 I think understandably nervous about introducing it into people.
0:11:58 And they realize both that they can, they can do pre-exposure of vaccination so that the
0:12:02 dog can’t get infected with rabies.
0:12:03 Hold that thought.
0:12:05 That’s not put into use right away.
0:12:13 But then they also can start a series of vaccine after the dog has been exposed to rabies and
0:12:15 prevent him from coming down with the disease.
0:12:21 So they figure this out and then we have this moment when it’s time to try it on a person
0:12:23 for the first time.
0:12:24 What is that moment?
0:12:31 So a case was brought to Louis Pasteur’s attention that seemed sufficiently concerning
0:12:34 to take a chance on this vaccine.
0:12:43 Then involved a young boy who was bitten by the grocer’s dog who had undergone a suspicious
0:12:47 behavior change and was marauding the neighborhood.
0:12:52 The bites were extensive and so that’s another potential risk factor for development of rabies
0:12:53 we talked about.
0:12:54 Meaning he got bitten many times.
0:12:57 Lots of places, you know, lots of places really deeply.
0:13:02 So lots of places where the virus could have encountered a nerve, making it likely that
0:13:04 he was going to come down with rabies at some point.
0:13:12 They were very pessimistic about the boy’s chances and so they sent him to Paris.
0:13:17 To Louis Pasteur’s lab where he had this vaccine that he had not yet tested on a human
0:13:18 being.
0:13:19 Yeah.
0:13:20 He had been thinking about testing it on himself.
0:13:21 Uh-huh.
0:13:22 A kind of tradition in science.
0:13:23 Yes.
0:13:24 Yeah.
0:13:28 But before he had a chance to test on himself, he was persuaded by the physicians caring
0:13:34 for this boy that this kid might very likely to die if he doesn’t get the vaccine.
0:13:38 And so Pasteur went ahead with his process.
0:13:43 So the boy gets this experimental vaccine and now Pasteur has to just wait, right?
0:13:44 Wait to see what happens.
0:13:50 So what’s going on with Pasteur while he’s, you know, waiting to see whether the boy survives?
0:13:55 Well, Pasteur was sleepless.
0:13:59 He was just in a state of agonized waiting and was having health problems related to
0:14:00 that.
0:14:01 He traveled a little bit for his health.
0:14:04 Well, he sort of ticked down the days.
0:14:05 What happens with the boy?
0:14:07 The boy does great.
0:14:11 He remains healthy during the 10-day process where he could see inoculations.
0:14:16 And once a few months had passed, the point at which, you know, it was believed he would
0:14:20 have come down with rabies by now, if not because of the, because of the bites, perhaps
0:14:24 because the vaccine was dangerous.
0:14:25 He continued to thrive.
0:14:26 Okay.
0:14:28 So the vaccine works.
0:14:30 What like, how does it play?
0:14:32 People were excited around the world.
0:14:39 I mean, the vanquishing of rabies was big news, just as Pasteur had calculated, not immediately
0:14:40 embraced by everyone.
0:14:46 There were physicians everywhere who had been following the science and sort of got it and
0:14:48 were eager to put it to use.
0:14:57 And in the sort of long run, in the, you know, 100-year arc, what does Pasteur’s work mean
0:15:03 both for rabies and for, you know, disease research and treatment more generally?
0:15:09 His lab is often credited with developing the science of immunology.
0:15:14 And furthermore, lead the foundations just with the basic idea that like, you can take
0:15:17 infectious agents and you can figure out a way to make them weaker.
0:15:23 That is the basis on which all modern vaccine science works.
0:15:28 So let’s talk about rabies today.
0:15:30 What is the status of rabies today?
0:15:37 So rabies is still a problem in many parts of the world who have not yet eliminated
0:15:38 dog rabies.
0:15:46 But we’re really lucky here that the use of the pre-exposure vaccine in dogs eliminated
0:15:47 dog rabies.
0:15:51 We no longer have to like look a scans at our pet dogs and worry that contact with them
0:15:53 could kill us.
0:15:59 The parts of the world where that is not true, where dog rabies is still endemic, places
0:16:05 like India and parts of Africa, there are still a lot of human rabies deaths.
0:16:11 I think the WHO uses the number 60,000 rabies deaths are still happening every year around
0:16:12 the world.
0:16:14 That number is really contested.
0:16:20 It’s been a real challenge getting the vaccines and the other products that fight rabies to
0:16:22 the people who need them most.
0:16:25 But those products are prohibitively expensive.
0:16:31 So rabies is considered a neglected disease by the international health authorities.
0:16:33 But people are still dying of rabies.
0:16:39 And then in parts of the world like Europe and the United States where dog rabies is
0:16:42 not the issue, we do still have wildlife rabies.
0:16:46 So like in the US, what wild animals have rabies?
0:16:56 There’s rabies adapted to foxes, skunks, raccoons, and a whole lot of bats in the United States.
0:16:57 Right.
0:17:02 I read that like if you wake up and there’s a bat in your room, you should probably get
0:17:05 a rabies shot because bats can bite you and you don’t even know it.
0:17:06 Yes.
0:17:10 There’s an argument for getting rabies vaccine if you wake up in a room with a bat, although
0:17:12 you should consult your local health authority.
0:17:18 Did writing the book change the way you think about the relationship between humans and animals?
0:17:24 I do think that there is a way in which our relationship with dogs and cats especially,
0:17:29 you know the sort of pure sweetness of it that a lot of us experience now, like it had
0:17:32 a darker side in the pre-vaccine era.
0:17:36 Your dog could turn into a monster and kill you or your child.
0:17:37 Yes.
0:17:39 That was like a real thing that could definitely happen.
0:17:40 Yeah.
0:17:46 It was a real thing and that made it really hard to love and baby our dogs in quite the
0:17:49 same way as we do today.
0:17:55 So like this modern phenomenon of the dog being to what is arguably a weird extent a part
0:18:01 of the family and I include my own family as you know in that, like you couldn’t really
0:18:04 have that without Pasteur, without the rabies vaccine.
0:18:08 It certainly doesn’t reach its sort of completion without that.
0:18:13 I mean, it’s wonderful for those of us who love dogs.
0:18:14 Thank you, Monica.
0:18:15 That was delightful.
0:18:16 Yeah.
0:18:17 Thanks.
0:18:24 Monica Murphy is the co-author with Bill Wasik of Rabbit, a cultural history of the world’s
0:18:26 most diabolical virus.
0:18:32 Their most recent book is Our Kindred Creatures, How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do
0:18:33 About Animals.
0:18:38 We’ll be back in a minute to talk about the surprising way that wildlife biologists are
0:18:43 fighting rabies in America right now.
0:18:48 Hey, everyone.
0:18:52 It’s Mary Harris, host of Slate’s Daily News podcast, What Next?
0:18:54 It’s been a long road to election day.
0:18:55 How you doing?
0:18:56 Uh.
0:19:01 We’ve had crazy cat ladies, coconut trees, not to mention a little last-minute candidate
0:19:02 swap.
0:19:04 The polling indicates where they’re sleeping.
0:19:07 I think viewers saw something other than what they were expecting.
0:19:10 In an election that seems as close as this one does, you know, any one of these little
0:19:12 factors can matter so much.
0:19:19 But after all that, here we are, at the end of the road, or maybe it’s just the beginning.
0:19:21 And what next has got you covered?
0:19:26 Every step of the way, for November 5th and the aftermath, we’ll have all the deep insights
0:19:31 and tongue-in-cheek political analysis you know and love from Slate.
0:19:32 So don’t miss out.
0:19:38 Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
0:19:43 By the early part of the 21st century, the rabies vaccine had almost entirely eliminated
0:19:46 rabies from people and dogs in the United States.
0:19:50 But the disease has persisted in wild animals.
0:19:53 I talked about this with Kathy Nelson.
0:19:57 Years ago when I was in Vermont, we used to operate a rabies hotline in the state.
0:20:02 It would get calls in from the public, and we would sometimes go out to investigate them.
0:20:08 And we had a skunk that was trying to bite the gas cap off of a lawnmower, and they’ll
0:20:13 just bite at anything that’s, you know, in sight, because that’s one of the fascinating
0:20:19 parts about the virus is that it’s designed to tell the brain to bite things.
0:20:25 Kathy is the wildlife biologist and the operation supervisor for the National Rabies Management
0:20:28 Program with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
0:20:32 For the past 26 years, she’s been part of a federal program that has been fighting rabies
0:20:36 in a way that I have to say I found delightful.
0:20:43 So tell me about the first time you went up in the air to fling rabies vaccines at the
0:20:44 ground?
0:20:48 Yeah, I still remember it was so exciting.
0:20:51 You know, you help load all these baits onto a plane.
0:20:54 You walk up the little steps of the small plane.
0:20:55 You get in it.
0:20:57 Somebody closes the hatch on you.
0:20:59 You know, the engines start.
0:21:00 You take off.
0:21:06 You’re flying over beautiful terrain and landscape, just beautiful agricultural forested land.
0:21:09 And you know, the person up front says, “Okay, machine on.”
0:21:13 And you know, baits are going down this little belt, and I’m just moving them around, looking
0:21:17 out the window, seeing moose, deer, all kinds of wildlife.
0:21:22 I literally could not believe that I was getting paid to do a job like this.
0:21:24 What kind of planes were you going up in?
0:21:26 They have a single wing, two engines.
0:21:27 How many seats?
0:21:28 How small is it?
0:21:33 If there were seats in them, there probably would be about a dozen seats.
0:21:37 You’re basically flying in a cargo van.
0:21:42 So these baits are falling from the sky.
0:21:45 Maybe this is a dumb question, but like, is there ever any word that are going to hit
0:21:46 somebody on the head?
0:21:47 Yeah.
0:21:48 No, not a dumb question at all.
0:21:49 Yeah.
0:21:54 So the navigator in the front seat, not the pilot, but the other person who is a USDA wildlife
0:21:57 services employee, they have an on/off switch.
0:22:02 So anytime we’re approaching a house or a road or a major body of water, that switch
0:22:05 goes off so that baits aren’t distributed.
0:22:10 You know, over the course of a 25-year program, we’ve hit a roof or two.
0:22:15 But fortunately, once folks learn about our program, they’re generally really, really
0:22:18 accepting of it and they’re not too mad.
0:22:20 Is it happening like literally today?
0:22:25 Is it happening this, you know, we’re talking in August of 2024.
0:22:27 Is there a plane in the air today?
0:22:33 There is literally, I got a text this morning saying all five aircraft are taxing for run-ups
0:22:35 and take off in Watertown.
0:22:36 That’s Watertown, New York.
0:22:38 Tell me about the baits.
0:22:42 What’s one of them look like, taste like?
0:22:44 So we use different vaccine types.
0:22:49 One of them looks like kind of like a little ketchup packet with a slight oil on the outside
0:22:53 and attached to that oil or tiny little fishmeal crumbs.
0:22:57 Fishmeal sounds delicious to a raccoon, I’m sure.
0:22:58 Yeah.
0:22:59 Yeah.
0:23:00 Okay.
0:23:04 So the other company, they make a sweet bait and it’s a sugary sweet like marshmallow
0:23:06 kind of sweet vanilla based bait.
0:23:11 Presumably you can’t just like fling these things out of an airplane over a city, right?
0:23:14 So how do you do it in, you know, urban areas?
0:23:18 Primarily we drive around in trucks, you know, someone’s driving, another person has the
0:23:24 window down in the passenger seat, they’re tossing a couple of baits down.
0:23:28 We record the location of all of these baits with a GPS unit so that we know where we’ve
0:23:30 baited.
0:23:36 Our biggest struggle right now is because there’s so many other food sources, you know, trying
0:23:42 to pull them away from a dumpster full of pizza to eat one of our baits is a real challenge.
0:23:47 I have literally seen a raccoon in Prospect Park in Brooklyn eating a whole slice of pizza.
0:23:48 Yeah.
0:23:52 They, I mean, they’re omnivores so they’re going to eat anything, you know, around,
0:23:59 but we have done a ton of research in urban areas looking at movement patterns, home range
0:24:03 sizes because you have to get them right in the right spot for them to even find them.
0:24:06 So let’s talk about the scope of the project now.
0:24:10 Like what is the range of where you, where you do this?
0:24:17 We have a band of vaccine distribution zone that goes from Maine, kind of across the Canada
0:24:22 border down to Ohio and then pretty much straight down from Ohio to Alabama.
0:24:27 And that’s designed to stop the westward spread of raccoon rabies and the northward spread
0:24:28 into Canada.
0:24:29 Oh, interesting.
0:24:32 It’s like a, like a line of defense.
0:24:34 Exactly.
0:24:39 Was that the notion when you started was the issue like, oh, rabies is spreading.
0:24:40 Yeah.
0:24:43 Let’s, let’s, let’s defend against the spread of rabies.
0:24:44 Yes.
0:24:47 So the story of raccoon rabies is a really interesting one.
0:24:52 Raccoon rabies was first sort of documented in the late 1940s in Florida.
0:24:58 But then there were some raccoon hunters from West Virginia, Virginia area who wanted to
0:25:00 replenish their raccoon supply.
0:25:04 They went down, it was real commonplace back then to move raccoons around for raccoon hunting.
0:25:10 So they went down south, got some raccoons, released them into an area on the Virginia,
0:25:15 West Virginia line and inevitably released some rabid raccoons without knowing it.
0:25:18 And then raccoon rabies exploded from there.
0:25:24 It reached most northeastern states by the early nineties.
0:25:29 And is there risk of raccoons passing rabies to humans?
0:25:30 Yeah.
0:25:31 Absolutely.
0:25:35 Over the years, there have been humans that have contracted raccoon rabies.
0:25:38 Certainly human health and safety is, is always paramount.
0:25:44 Also animal health and safety, you know, every year there’s, there’s about 300 cats in the
0:25:46 U S that die from rabies.
0:25:49 There’s about 50 dogs that die from rabies.
0:25:55 It’s a cost benefit sort of program where what it costs us to manage our program is
0:26:00 significantly less than what it costs the American public to live with rabies every
0:26:01 year.
0:26:06 Just in terms of health care costs, you know, public education, post-exposure prophylaxis,
0:26:09 all of that adds up really fast.
0:26:15 So the program started in the nineties to stop the spread of raccoon rabies.
0:26:16 Has it worked?
0:26:18 Did it stop the spread of raccoon rabies?
0:26:19 It did.
0:26:25 After we distribute baits about a month after we go back into an area and we use live traps
0:26:30 to catch raccoons, we take a blood sample from them, pull a tooth, weigh them, sex them,
0:26:33 take some general notes on, you know, their condition.
0:26:37 And that blood sample gets sent off to the lab and that tells us ultimately whether or
0:26:40 not they have antibodies against rabies.
0:26:44 And the tooth gives us their age and also tells us whether or not they ate the bait because
0:26:48 the bait has a biomarker that stains their tooth.
0:26:51 So that whole process, that’s our monitoring program along with all the surveillance we
0:26:57 do where we do pick up dead raccoons off the road and test them for rabies.
0:27:05 The Centers for Disease Controls CDC has documented a 77% decline in raccoons with raccoon variants
0:27:08 since our program began in 1997.
0:27:10 So we know it’s working.
0:27:17 We’ve made significant progress in being able to move that zone to the east toward the ocean,
0:27:22 which is what, you know, our ultimate goal is that bait zone of containment and then
0:27:27 just keep marching it toward the ocean till, you know, till you’ve eliminated the variant.
0:27:28 Right.
0:27:29 When you get to the sea, you’re done.
0:27:31 You’re like marching to the sea.
0:27:32 Yep.
0:27:33 You’re done.
0:27:35 So you’ve been doing this a long time.
0:27:38 You were a wildlife biologist by training.
0:27:44 I’m curious if your career has changed the way you feel about wildlife, about the relationship
0:27:46 between humans and wildlife?
0:27:47 Yeah.
0:27:49 I mean, I love all wildlife.
0:27:54 You know, when I was in college getting my degree, you know, like any wildlife professional,
0:27:59 I think you dream of, you know, working with polar bears or mountain lions or, you know,
0:28:05 some big charismatic megafauna and, you know, and I landed on raccoons, but I wouldn’t
0:28:07 change it for anything.
0:28:08 They’re so smart.
0:28:16 They have not made a trash can yet that they can’t get into, or they’re just, you know,
0:28:21 if you have ever seen one up close or, or I, you know, I would encourage any listeners
0:28:24 if they have the opportunity and they see one dead on the road.
0:28:27 It sounds crazy, but just stop and look at it.
0:28:29 They’re fascinating animals.
0:28:31 They have little hands just like we do.
0:28:37 They have an opposable thumb, genetically, they’re closer in origin to bears than they
0:28:41 are to like cats and dogs and those kind of things.
0:28:44 So they’re just really smart animals.
0:28:46 They think about what they’re doing.
0:28:51 We have a National Wildlife Research Center and they did a side study where they would
0:28:54 put a marshmallow in the tube of water and the raccoons would learn that all they had
0:28:58 to do was keep putting more rocks in the water until that marshmallow rose to the top and
0:29:00 they can reach in and eat it.
0:29:05 So that’s just one example of how smart they are and how if they’re given enough time,
0:29:07 they’ll figure something out.
0:29:08 Thank you so much for your time.
0:29:09 It was great to speak with you.
0:29:10 Yeah, you too.
0:29:12 Thanks for having me.
0:29:17 Kathy Nelson is a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
0:29:23 Thanks to both my guests today, Kathy Nelson and Monica Murphy.
0:29:25 Next week on Incubation.
0:29:29 I made up my mind that I have to go do it, but at the same time, I was going to deal
0:29:36 with the beast, which means I may not come back home alive.
0:29:41 Incubation is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeart Media.
0:29:44 It’s produced by Kate Furby and Brittany Cronin.
0:29:46 The show is edited by Lacey Roberts.
0:29:50 It’s mastered by Sarah Bruguere, fact-checking by Joseph Friedman.
0:29:53 Our executive producers are Lacey Roberts and Matt Romano.
0:29:55 I’m Jacob Goldstein.
0:29:55 Thanks for listening.
0:30:16 Hey, everyone, it’s Mary Harris, host of Slate’s Daily News Podcast, What Next?
0:30:18 It’s been a long road to election day.
0:30:19 How you doing?
0:30:20 Ugh.
0:30:25 We’ve had crazy cat ladies, coconut trees, not to mention a little last-minute candidate
0:30:26 swap.
0:30:28 The polling indicates where they’re slipping.
0:30:31 I think viewers saw something other than what they were expecting.
0:30:34 In an election that seems as close as this one does, you know, any one of these little
0:30:36 factors can matter so much.
0:30:43 But after all that, here we are, at the end of the road, or maybe it’s just the beginning.
0:30:45 And what next has got you covered?
0:30:50 Every step of the way for November 5th and the aftermath, we’ll have all the deep insights
0:30:55 and tongue-in-cheek political analysis you know and love from Slate.
0:30:59 So don’t miss out, follow, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
0:31:02 (upbeat music)
0:00:12 Hey, it’s Jacob.
0:00:18 If you want more podcasts about creative people solving high stakes technical problems, I’ve
0:00:20 got good news for you.
0:00:24 A new season of a show called Incubation is out now.
0:00:26 Incubation is a show about viruses.
0:00:31 I’m the host of the show, and the people I interviewed for this season have been full
0:00:35 of insight and delight, and I have learned a ton.
0:00:40 So, basically, I think if you like what’s your problem, you will like Incubation.
0:00:45 Here is the first episode of the new season of the show, and if you do like it, you can
0:00:50 listen to more episodes wherever you’re listening to this.
0:00:53 Here’s a story about rabies in three sentences.
0:00:55 You get bitten by a rabid animal.
0:00:59 You lose control of your mind, and then you die.
0:01:05 So, it is not surprising that rabies terrified humanity for thousands of years.
0:01:07 Why did you write a book about rabies?
0:01:14 Gosh, I have always thought rabies was so interesting in terms of its biology, the
0:01:20 way it hijacks the brain to ensure that it’ll continue its own spread, the way it affects
0:01:24 the relationship between people and animals, which, since I’m a veterinarian, is pretty
0:01:26 central to my life.
0:01:32 Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and the co-author with Bill Wasik of “Rabid,” a cultural history
0:01:35 of the world’s most diabolical virus.
0:01:39 I should mention that Monica also happens to be my neighbor and a friend of mine.
0:01:47 I think the stories that my rabid Google alert turns up every week of, you know, bobcats
0:01:54 like coming into a bar and like assaulting someone at a pool table or raccoons attacking
0:02:00 people’s trucks, all that stuff, is just really interesting and scary and the stuff
0:02:01 of nightmares.
0:02:05 But I love that science has an answer for all of that.
0:02:09 In the developed world, almost nobody gets rabies anymore.
0:02:12 In the United States, it’s fewer than 10 people a year.
0:02:16 Even our dogs are safe from the disease for the most part.
0:02:20 And the reason for this, the reason we don’t have to worry that every barking dog we see
0:02:25 might bite us and kill us goes back to one of the most important scientists in the history
0:02:31 of both viruses and vaccines, Louis Pasteur.
0:02:35 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is Incubation, a show about viruses.
0:02:38 We’re delighted to be launching season two today.
0:02:42 We have lots more viruses to talk about this season, and we’re starting with rabies.
0:02:46 In the first half of the show, we’ll be talking to Monica about rabies and the work of Louis
0:02:47 Pasteur.
0:02:51 In the second half of the show, we’ll talk to a scientist who’s fighting rabies in
0:02:55 wildlife in a really surprising way.
0:02:59 Hey, everyone.
0:03:02 It’s Mary Harris, host of Slate’s Daily News Podcast, What Next?
0:03:05 It’s been a long road to election day.
0:03:06 How you doing?
0:03:12 We’ve had crazy cat ladies, coconut trees, not to mention a little last minute candidate
0:03:13 swap.
0:03:14 The polling indicates where they’re sleeping.
0:03:18 I think viewers saw something other than what they were expecting.
0:03:21 In an election that seems as close as this one does, you know, any one of these little
0:03:23 factors can matter so much.
0:03:29 But after all that, here we are at the end of the road, or maybe it’s just the beginning.
0:03:35 And What Next has got you covered every step of the way for November 5th and the aftermath.
0:03:40 We’ll have all the deep insights and tongue-in-cheek political analysis you know and love from
0:03:41 Slate.
0:03:49 So don’t miss out, follow, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
0:03:50 So let’s talk about rabies.
0:03:51 What is rabies?
0:03:55 So rabies is an RNA virus.
0:04:02 It is special because it is transmitted through bites primarily.
0:04:07 Unlike the sort of transmission pattern we see with other viruses, in rabies at the
0:04:13 site of the bite, the virus is looking to interact with a nerve.
0:04:18 And once it has engaged the nerve, it kind of ratchets its way up the central nervous
0:04:24 system from the bite site through peripheral nerves up into the spine and from the spine
0:04:26 up into the brain.
0:04:27 It takes a while.
0:04:29 It’s a slow, slow process.
0:04:31 It’s like a centimeter a day or something.
0:04:38 There is a real sort of relationship between how far away the bite is from the brain and
0:04:43 how long it takes to develop rabies, although it’s not strict.
0:04:49 And it does mean that if you’re bitten on the face, you are likely to come down with
0:04:52 rabies faster than if you’re bitten on the toe.
0:04:57 And not every bite from a rabid animal will result in transmission.
0:05:01 It’s something like 20% to give me a round number.
0:05:07 And once the virus does make it into the brain, you’re going to develop symptoms of rabies.
0:05:11 They’re horrible and then you’re going to die.
0:05:15 It’s practically speaking 100% fatal, really rotten.
0:05:20 And the way it works too, which is pretty horrifying if you think about it, is it’s
0:05:24 hijacking the brain to ensure that it’s going to be spread to another individual.
0:05:25 What do you mean?
0:05:32 So especially in the species it’s adapted to, let’s say dog rabies.
0:05:39 In the dog, it is going to stimulate parts of the brain that kind of rev up that dog’s
0:05:45 sort of social emotional state, make it much more prone to violence and biting incidents
0:05:51 with other dogs so that meanwhile it’s being secreted in the saliva, it’s really increasing
0:05:55 the likelihood that it’s going to make it into another dog and continue its life cycle.
0:05:57 Which is kind of amazing, right?
0:06:05 It’s just a virus and it’s essentially evolved to change the behavior of this complex mammal
0:06:09 to make it bite other mammals so that the virus will spread.
0:06:11 That is a wild feat of evolution.
0:06:12 Yeah.
0:06:13 Yeah.
0:06:16 It’s really, really scary.
0:06:22 In places where humans are frequently in contact with rabid animals, the sort of behavioral
0:06:29 changes that occur in the human rabies victim are also really messy.
0:06:34 Human with rabies might not actively try to bite you unless they’re a little kid.
0:06:38 They might punch you in the nose or just scream curses at you.
0:06:41 In general, people become more hostile, more violent.
0:06:42 Yeah.
0:06:43 Or sexed up.
0:06:44 Uh-huh.
0:06:45 Or more id.
0:06:46 Yeah.
0:06:47 Terrifying.
0:06:50 You’re being attacked by your own brain.
0:06:54 Somehow your own thoughts are attacking you.
0:06:55 Yeah.
0:06:56 Yeah.
0:07:04 You talk with respect to that in the book about kind of rabies and mythology, right?
0:07:07 Rabies and werewolves, rabies and vampires.
0:07:08 Tell me about that.
0:07:14 There’s at least a deep resonance between these stories of a sort of contagious, you
0:07:20 know, contagious zombie-ism or werewolf-ism or vampirism, where the bite, the bite, apparently.
0:07:21 A bat.
0:07:22 Yeah.
0:07:23 And there’s the association with bats and vampires.
0:07:30 And both, and both bats and wolves are historical vectors of rabies, just to be clear.
0:07:32 So this is kind of rabies.
0:07:35 It’s this ancient disease.
0:07:41 It is terrifying where crazed animals bite people and turn people into crazed animals
0:07:42 who then die.
0:07:47 It’s basically the state of play for rabies forever.
0:07:53 And then onto the stage of history walks our hero, Louis Pasteur.
0:07:55 Tell me about Pasteur.
0:08:00 Most folks know at least a little bit about Louis Pasteur because he had a long scientific
0:08:01 career.
0:08:05 He was trained as a physicist and chemist.
0:08:14 And he grew into more of a microbiological concentration in his work along the way he
0:08:16 established germ theory.
0:08:17 Yes.
0:08:20 That people thought was like a crazy idea.
0:08:24 And this is like mid to late 1800s, right?
0:08:28 And the world already had the smallpox vaccine at this point.
0:08:32 But I do feel like it’s worth remembering here that that was sort of this lucky break,
0:08:33 right?
0:08:36 Where like there just happened to be this mild disease, cowpox that made people immune
0:08:40 to this terrible disease, to smallpox.
0:08:44 And Pasteur, as you write in the book, he decides that he’s going to apply this germ
0:08:46 theory to vaccines, right?
0:08:49 He’s actually going to use science to create a vaccine.
0:08:52 So tell us about that.
0:08:59 What Louis Pasteur sought to do and succeeded in doing for the first time ever is manipulating
0:09:06 microbes to sort of move them away from their wild state into an attenuated weakened state
0:09:09 and induce immunity using those.
0:09:10 Right.
0:09:11 So, okay.
0:09:16 So Pasteur, he develops a few animal vaccines in this way and then he decides that the first
0:09:21 human vaccine he’s going to make is going to be a rabies vaccine, you know, a vaccine
0:09:24 for this terrifying disease.
0:09:26 So what does he actually have to do?
0:09:34 So because there’s no way to grow rabies inside of a test tube, he had to maintain a population
0:09:35 of rabid animals in his lab.
0:09:36 Terrifying.
0:09:37 Yeah, awful.
0:09:41 I mean, really gruesome and scary for the people he worked with.
0:09:48 They would harvest the saliva and introduce it into more dogs or into rabbits.
0:09:51 How do you harvest the saliva from a rabid dog?
0:09:52 Really carefully.
0:09:53 Yeah.
0:09:54 Right.
0:09:55 I walked into that.
0:09:56 But yeah, involving like a pipette.
0:09:57 Oh my God.
0:09:58 Yeah.
0:09:59 In the mouth of a rabid dog.
0:10:00 Yeah.
0:10:01 And it’s 1850.
0:10:02 I’m going to die.
0:10:03 Yeah.
0:10:04 I’m afraid.
0:10:06 So you’ve got step one, find the nasty disease.
0:10:11 Step two, seemingly the harder part, turn that nasty disease into a thing that will induce
0:10:13 immunity without causing disease.
0:10:14 Right.
0:10:15 They can’t see the microbe.
0:10:17 They know it’s in the nervous tissue.
0:10:26 So they start dissecting out nervous tissue from animals with rabies, specifically rabbits.
0:10:33 And they aged it, they age the tissue in a sort of desiccating tray and determined that
0:10:36 with sufficient aging, it weakens it.
0:10:39 Just leave it sitting on the shelf for a while.
0:10:40 Yeah.
0:10:44 Except they ultimately arrived at a method that was a lot more complex.
0:10:51 They had a sort of, well, a whole sort of assembly line of tissues at various stages
0:10:52 of aging.
0:10:53 Okay.
0:10:56 So you know, you’ve got your rabbit spinal cord over here that’s aged 14 days and here’s
0:10:59 a 13 day one and etc.
0:11:05 The ones that are oldest are least virulent, the ones that are newest are most virulent.
0:11:08 And too dangerous to put right into a person right out of the gate.
0:11:13 So they start with an injection of the longest aged nervous tissue.
0:11:14 The weakest.
0:11:15 The weakest one.
0:11:16 Yeah.
0:11:21 And then over, I think it was 10 days, the initial protocol, they inject 13 injections
0:11:26 with progressively stronger, that is newer tissue.
0:11:32 And so is the basic idea like the weakest one induces some immune response so that you can
0:11:37 then tolerate a slightly stronger one and you’re kind of going up a staircase of immunity?
0:11:38 That’s how we developed it.
0:11:43 And then of course, today we just have a single strength rabies vaccine in use.
0:11:47 So his method wasn’t the only way to induce immunity, but it’s, you know, they were dealing
0:11:50 with a 100% fatal disease.
0:11:53 I think understandably nervous about introducing it into people.
0:11:58 And they realize both that they can, they can do pre-exposure of vaccination so that the
0:12:02 dog can’t get infected with rabies.
0:12:03 Hold that thought.
0:12:05 That’s not put into use right away.
0:12:13 But then they also can start a series of vaccine after the dog has been exposed to rabies and
0:12:15 prevent him from coming down with the disease.
0:12:21 So they figure this out and then we have this moment when it’s time to try it on a person
0:12:23 for the first time.
0:12:24 What is that moment?
0:12:31 So a case was brought to Louis Pasteur’s attention that seemed sufficiently concerning
0:12:34 to take a chance on this vaccine.
0:12:43 Then involved a young boy who was bitten by the grocer’s dog who had undergone a suspicious
0:12:47 behavior change and was marauding the neighborhood.
0:12:52 The bites were extensive and so that’s another potential risk factor for development of rabies
0:12:53 we talked about.
0:12:54 Meaning he got bitten many times.
0:12:57 Lots of places, you know, lots of places really deeply.
0:13:02 So lots of places where the virus could have encountered a nerve, making it likely that
0:13:04 he was going to come down with rabies at some point.
0:13:12 They were very pessimistic about the boy’s chances and so they sent him to Paris.
0:13:17 To Louis Pasteur’s lab where he had this vaccine that he had not yet tested on a human
0:13:18 being.
0:13:19 Yeah.
0:13:20 He had been thinking about testing it on himself.
0:13:21 Uh-huh.
0:13:22 A kind of tradition in science.
0:13:23 Yes.
0:13:24 Yeah.
0:13:28 But before he had a chance to test on himself, he was persuaded by the physicians caring
0:13:34 for this boy that this kid might very likely to die if he doesn’t get the vaccine.
0:13:38 And so Pasteur went ahead with his process.
0:13:43 So the boy gets this experimental vaccine and now Pasteur has to just wait, right?
0:13:44 Wait to see what happens.
0:13:50 So what’s going on with Pasteur while he’s, you know, waiting to see whether the boy survives?
0:13:55 Well, Pasteur was sleepless.
0:13:59 He was just in a state of agonized waiting and was having health problems related to
0:14:00 that.
0:14:01 He traveled a little bit for his health.
0:14:04 Well, he sort of ticked down the days.
0:14:05 What happens with the boy?
0:14:07 The boy does great.
0:14:11 He remains healthy during the 10-day process where he could see inoculations.
0:14:16 And once a few months had passed, the point at which, you know, it was believed he would
0:14:20 have come down with rabies by now, if not because of the, because of the bites, perhaps
0:14:24 because the vaccine was dangerous.
0:14:25 He continued to thrive.
0:14:26 Okay.
0:14:28 So the vaccine works.
0:14:30 What like, how does it play?
0:14:32 People were excited around the world.
0:14:39 I mean, the vanquishing of rabies was big news, just as Pasteur had calculated, not immediately
0:14:40 embraced by everyone.
0:14:46 There were physicians everywhere who had been following the science and sort of got it and
0:14:48 were eager to put it to use.
0:14:57 And in the sort of long run, in the, you know, 100-year arc, what does Pasteur’s work mean
0:15:03 both for rabies and for, you know, disease research and treatment more generally?
0:15:09 His lab is often credited with developing the science of immunology.
0:15:14 And furthermore, lead the foundations just with the basic idea that like, you can take
0:15:17 infectious agents and you can figure out a way to make them weaker.
0:15:23 That is the basis on which all modern vaccine science works.
0:15:28 So let’s talk about rabies today.
0:15:30 What is the status of rabies today?
0:15:37 So rabies is still a problem in many parts of the world who have not yet eliminated
0:15:38 dog rabies.
0:15:46 But we’re really lucky here that the use of the pre-exposure vaccine in dogs eliminated
0:15:47 dog rabies.
0:15:51 We no longer have to like look a scans at our pet dogs and worry that contact with them
0:15:53 could kill us.
0:15:59 The parts of the world where that is not true, where dog rabies is still endemic, places
0:16:05 like India and parts of Africa, there are still a lot of human rabies deaths.
0:16:11 I think the WHO uses the number 60,000 rabies deaths are still happening every year around
0:16:12 the world.
0:16:14 That number is really contested.
0:16:20 It’s been a real challenge getting the vaccines and the other products that fight rabies to
0:16:22 the people who need them most.
0:16:25 But those products are prohibitively expensive.
0:16:31 So rabies is considered a neglected disease by the international health authorities.
0:16:33 But people are still dying of rabies.
0:16:39 And then in parts of the world like Europe and the United States where dog rabies is
0:16:42 not the issue, we do still have wildlife rabies.
0:16:46 So like in the US, what wild animals have rabies?
0:16:56 There’s rabies adapted to foxes, skunks, raccoons, and a whole lot of bats in the United States.
0:16:57 Right.
0:17:02 I read that like if you wake up and there’s a bat in your room, you should probably get
0:17:05 a rabies shot because bats can bite you and you don’t even know it.
0:17:06 Yes.
0:17:10 There’s an argument for getting rabies vaccine if you wake up in a room with a bat, although
0:17:12 you should consult your local health authority.
0:17:18 Did writing the book change the way you think about the relationship between humans and animals?
0:17:24 I do think that there is a way in which our relationship with dogs and cats especially,
0:17:29 you know the sort of pure sweetness of it that a lot of us experience now, like it had
0:17:32 a darker side in the pre-vaccine era.
0:17:36 Your dog could turn into a monster and kill you or your child.
0:17:37 Yes.
0:17:39 That was like a real thing that could definitely happen.
0:17:40 Yeah.
0:17:46 It was a real thing and that made it really hard to love and baby our dogs in quite the
0:17:49 same way as we do today.
0:17:55 So like this modern phenomenon of the dog being to what is arguably a weird extent a part
0:18:01 of the family and I include my own family as you know in that, like you couldn’t really
0:18:04 have that without Pasteur, without the rabies vaccine.
0:18:08 It certainly doesn’t reach its sort of completion without that.
0:18:13 I mean, it’s wonderful for those of us who love dogs.
0:18:14 Thank you, Monica.
0:18:15 That was delightful.
0:18:16 Yeah.
0:18:17 Thanks.
0:18:24 Monica Murphy is the co-author with Bill Wasik of Rabbit, a cultural history of the world’s
0:18:26 most diabolical virus.
0:18:32 Their most recent book is Our Kindred Creatures, How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do
0:18:33 About Animals.
0:18:38 We’ll be back in a minute to talk about the surprising way that wildlife biologists are
0:18:43 fighting rabies in America right now.
0:18:48 Hey, everyone.
0:18:52 It’s Mary Harris, host of Slate’s Daily News podcast, What Next?
0:18:54 It’s been a long road to election day.
0:18:55 How you doing?
0:18:56 Uh.
0:19:01 We’ve had crazy cat ladies, coconut trees, not to mention a little last-minute candidate
0:19:02 swap.
0:19:04 The polling indicates where they’re sleeping.
0:19:07 I think viewers saw something other than what they were expecting.
0:19:10 In an election that seems as close as this one does, you know, any one of these little
0:19:12 factors can matter so much.
0:19:19 But after all that, here we are, at the end of the road, or maybe it’s just the beginning.
0:19:21 And what next has got you covered?
0:19:26 Every step of the way, for November 5th and the aftermath, we’ll have all the deep insights
0:19:31 and tongue-in-cheek political analysis you know and love from Slate.
0:19:32 So don’t miss out.
0:19:38 Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
0:19:43 By the early part of the 21st century, the rabies vaccine had almost entirely eliminated
0:19:46 rabies from people and dogs in the United States.
0:19:50 But the disease has persisted in wild animals.
0:19:53 I talked about this with Kathy Nelson.
0:19:57 Years ago when I was in Vermont, we used to operate a rabies hotline in the state.
0:20:02 It would get calls in from the public, and we would sometimes go out to investigate them.
0:20:08 And we had a skunk that was trying to bite the gas cap off of a lawnmower, and they’ll
0:20:13 just bite at anything that’s, you know, in sight, because that’s one of the fascinating
0:20:19 parts about the virus is that it’s designed to tell the brain to bite things.
0:20:25 Kathy is the wildlife biologist and the operation supervisor for the National Rabies Management
0:20:28 Program with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
0:20:32 For the past 26 years, she’s been part of a federal program that has been fighting rabies
0:20:36 in a way that I have to say I found delightful.
0:20:43 So tell me about the first time you went up in the air to fling rabies vaccines at the
0:20:44 ground?
0:20:48 Yeah, I still remember it was so exciting.
0:20:51 You know, you help load all these baits onto a plane.
0:20:54 You walk up the little steps of the small plane.
0:20:55 You get in it.
0:20:57 Somebody closes the hatch on you.
0:20:59 You know, the engines start.
0:21:00 You take off.
0:21:06 You’re flying over beautiful terrain and landscape, just beautiful agricultural forested land.
0:21:09 And you know, the person up front says, “Okay, machine on.”
0:21:13 And you know, baits are going down this little belt, and I’m just moving them around, looking
0:21:17 out the window, seeing moose, deer, all kinds of wildlife.
0:21:22 I literally could not believe that I was getting paid to do a job like this.
0:21:24 What kind of planes were you going up in?
0:21:26 They have a single wing, two engines.
0:21:27 How many seats?
0:21:28 How small is it?
0:21:33 If there were seats in them, there probably would be about a dozen seats.
0:21:37 You’re basically flying in a cargo van.
0:21:42 So these baits are falling from the sky.
0:21:45 Maybe this is a dumb question, but like, is there ever any word that are going to hit
0:21:46 somebody on the head?
0:21:47 Yeah.
0:21:48 No, not a dumb question at all.
0:21:49 Yeah.
0:21:54 So the navigator in the front seat, not the pilot, but the other person who is a USDA wildlife
0:21:57 services employee, they have an on/off switch.
0:22:02 So anytime we’re approaching a house or a road or a major body of water, that switch
0:22:05 goes off so that baits aren’t distributed.
0:22:10 You know, over the course of a 25-year program, we’ve hit a roof or two.
0:22:15 But fortunately, once folks learn about our program, they’re generally really, really
0:22:18 accepting of it and they’re not too mad.
0:22:20 Is it happening like literally today?
0:22:25 Is it happening this, you know, we’re talking in August of 2024.
0:22:27 Is there a plane in the air today?
0:22:33 There is literally, I got a text this morning saying all five aircraft are taxing for run-ups
0:22:35 and take off in Watertown.
0:22:36 That’s Watertown, New York.
0:22:38 Tell me about the baits.
0:22:42 What’s one of them look like, taste like?
0:22:44 So we use different vaccine types.
0:22:49 One of them looks like kind of like a little ketchup packet with a slight oil on the outside
0:22:53 and attached to that oil or tiny little fishmeal crumbs.
0:22:57 Fishmeal sounds delicious to a raccoon, I’m sure.
0:22:58 Yeah.
0:22:59 Yeah.
0:23:00 Okay.
0:23:04 So the other company, they make a sweet bait and it’s a sugary sweet like marshmallow
0:23:06 kind of sweet vanilla based bait.
0:23:11 Presumably you can’t just like fling these things out of an airplane over a city, right?
0:23:14 So how do you do it in, you know, urban areas?
0:23:18 Primarily we drive around in trucks, you know, someone’s driving, another person has the
0:23:24 window down in the passenger seat, they’re tossing a couple of baits down.
0:23:28 We record the location of all of these baits with a GPS unit so that we know where we’ve
0:23:30 baited.
0:23:36 Our biggest struggle right now is because there’s so many other food sources, you know, trying
0:23:42 to pull them away from a dumpster full of pizza to eat one of our baits is a real challenge.
0:23:47 I have literally seen a raccoon in Prospect Park in Brooklyn eating a whole slice of pizza.
0:23:48 Yeah.
0:23:52 They, I mean, they’re omnivores so they’re going to eat anything, you know, around,
0:23:59 but we have done a ton of research in urban areas looking at movement patterns, home range
0:24:03 sizes because you have to get them right in the right spot for them to even find them.
0:24:06 So let’s talk about the scope of the project now.
0:24:10 Like what is the range of where you, where you do this?
0:24:17 We have a band of vaccine distribution zone that goes from Maine, kind of across the Canada
0:24:22 border down to Ohio and then pretty much straight down from Ohio to Alabama.
0:24:27 And that’s designed to stop the westward spread of raccoon rabies and the northward spread
0:24:28 into Canada.
0:24:29 Oh, interesting.
0:24:32 It’s like a, like a line of defense.
0:24:34 Exactly.
0:24:39 Was that the notion when you started was the issue like, oh, rabies is spreading.
0:24:40 Yeah.
0:24:43 Let’s, let’s, let’s defend against the spread of rabies.
0:24:44 Yes.
0:24:47 So the story of raccoon rabies is a really interesting one.
0:24:52 Raccoon rabies was first sort of documented in the late 1940s in Florida.
0:24:58 But then there were some raccoon hunters from West Virginia, Virginia area who wanted to
0:25:00 replenish their raccoon supply.
0:25:04 They went down, it was real commonplace back then to move raccoons around for raccoon hunting.
0:25:10 So they went down south, got some raccoons, released them into an area on the Virginia,
0:25:15 West Virginia line and inevitably released some rabid raccoons without knowing it.
0:25:18 And then raccoon rabies exploded from there.
0:25:24 It reached most northeastern states by the early nineties.
0:25:29 And is there risk of raccoons passing rabies to humans?
0:25:30 Yeah.
0:25:31 Absolutely.
0:25:35 Over the years, there have been humans that have contracted raccoon rabies.
0:25:38 Certainly human health and safety is, is always paramount.
0:25:44 Also animal health and safety, you know, every year there’s, there’s about 300 cats in the
0:25:46 U S that die from rabies.
0:25:49 There’s about 50 dogs that die from rabies.
0:25:55 It’s a cost benefit sort of program where what it costs us to manage our program is
0:26:00 significantly less than what it costs the American public to live with rabies every
0:26:01 year.
0:26:06 Just in terms of health care costs, you know, public education, post-exposure prophylaxis,
0:26:09 all of that adds up really fast.
0:26:15 So the program started in the nineties to stop the spread of raccoon rabies.
0:26:16 Has it worked?
0:26:18 Did it stop the spread of raccoon rabies?
0:26:19 It did.
0:26:25 After we distribute baits about a month after we go back into an area and we use live traps
0:26:30 to catch raccoons, we take a blood sample from them, pull a tooth, weigh them, sex them,
0:26:33 take some general notes on, you know, their condition.
0:26:37 And that blood sample gets sent off to the lab and that tells us ultimately whether or
0:26:40 not they have antibodies against rabies.
0:26:44 And the tooth gives us their age and also tells us whether or not they ate the bait because
0:26:48 the bait has a biomarker that stains their tooth.
0:26:51 So that whole process, that’s our monitoring program along with all the surveillance we
0:26:57 do where we do pick up dead raccoons off the road and test them for rabies.
0:27:05 The Centers for Disease Controls CDC has documented a 77% decline in raccoons with raccoon variants
0:27:08 since our program began in 1997.
0:27:10 So we know it’s working.
0:27:17 We’ve made significant progress in being able to move that zone to the east toward the ocean,
0:27:22 which is what, you know, our ultimate goal is that bait zone of containment and then
0:27:27 just keep marching it toward the ocean till, you know, till you’ve eliminated the variant.
0:27:28 Right.
0:27:29 When you get to the sea, you’re done.
0:27:31 You’re like marching to the sea.
0:27:32 Yep.
0:27:33 You’re done.
0:27:35 So you’ve been doing this a long time.
0:27:38 You were a wildlife biologist by training.
0:27:44 I’m curious if your career has changed the way you feel about wildlife, about the relationship
0:27:46 between humans and wildlife?
0:27:47 Yeah.
0:27:49 I mean, I love all wildlife.
0:27:54 You know, when I was in college getting my degree, you know, like any wildlife professional,
0:27:59 I think you dream of, you know, working with polar bears or mountain lions or, you know,
0:28:05 some big charismatic megafauna and, you know, and I landed on raccoons, but I wouldn’t
0:28:07 change it for anything.
0:28:08 They’re so smart.
0:28:16 They have not made a trash can yet that they can’t get into, or they’re just, you know,
0:28:21 if you have ever seen one up close or, or I, you know, I would encourage any listeners
0:28:24 if they have the opportunity and they see one dead on the road.
0:28:27 It sounds crazy, but just stop and look at it.
0:28:29 They’re fascinating animals.
0:28:31 They have little hands just like we do.
0:28:37 They have an opposable thumb, genetically, they’re closer in origin to bears than they
0:28:41 are to like cats and dogs and those kind of things.
0:28:44 So they’re just really smart animals.
0:28:46 They think about what they’re doing.
0:28:51 We have a National Wildlife Research Center and they did a side study where they would
0:28:54 put a marshmallow in the tube of water and the raccoons would learn that all they had
0:28:58 to do was keep putting more rocks in the water until that marshmallow rose to the top and
0:29:00 they can reach in and eat it.
0:29:05 So that’s just one example of how smart they are and how if they’re given enough time,
0:29:07 they’ll figure something out.
0:29:08 Thank you so much for your time.
0:29:09 It was great to speak with you.
0:29:10 Yeah, you too.
0:29:12 Thanks for having me.
0:29:17 Kathy Nelson is a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
0:29:23 Thanks to both my guests today, Kathy Nelson and Monica Murphy.
0:29:25 Next week on Incubation.
0:29:29 I made up my mind that I have to go do it, but at the same time, I was going to deal
0:29:36 with the beast, which means I may not come back home alive.
0:29:41 Incubation is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeart Media.
0:29:44 It’s produced by Kate Furby and Brittany Cronin.
0:29:46 The show is edited by Lacey Roberts.
0:29:50 It’s mastered by Sarah Bruguere, fact-checking by Joseph Friedman.
0:29:53 Our executive producers are Lacey Roberts and Matt Romano.
0:29:55 I’m Jacob Goldstein.
0:29:55 Thanks for listening.
0:30:16 Hey, everyone, it’s Mary Harris, host of Slate’s Daily News Podcast, What Next?
0:30:18 It’s been a long road to election day.
0:30:19 How you doing?
0:30:20 Ugh.
0:30:25 We’ve had crazy cat ladies, coconut trees, not to mention a little last-minute candidate
0:30:26 swap.
0:30:28 The polling indicates where they’re slipping.
0:30:31 I think viewers saw something other than what they were expecting.
0:30:34 In an election that seems as close as this one does, you know, any one of these little
0:30:36 factors can matter so much.
0:30:43 But after all that, here we are, at the end of the road, or maybe it’s just the beginning.
0:30:45 And what next has got you covered?
0:30:50 Every step of the way for November 5th and the aftermath, we’ll have all the deep insights
0:30:55 and tongue-in-cheek political analysis you know and love from Slate.
0:30:59 So don’t miss out, follow, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
0:31:02 (upbeat music)
Why has rabies invaded our nightmares for centuries? Author and veterinarian Monica Murphy tells us about the cultural history of rabies (which involves vampires and werewolves!) and how our long nightmare with the disease came to an end. Then, wildlife biologist Kathy Nelson tells us about a surprising program that works to control raccoon rabies… from the sky. Enjoy this episode from Incubation, another Pushkin podcast.
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