An adorable stray kitten has sparked a huge rabies scare after being taken in by a Nebraska couple who the animal bit and scratched before dying.
The black-and-white tuxedo kitten was rescued by Madeline and Rich Wahl in Omaha after a friend found him, with the Wahls naming the doomed kitty Stanley.
Stanley barely weighed two pounds and had stopped eating and developed seizures when the Wahls took him to the veterinarian, according to The Washington Post.
One of his pupils was also bigger than the other. The couple thought their new furry friend was having a bad reaction to medication for ringworm.
The vet suspected nearly two dozen possible causes for Stanley’s illness – but considered rabies a remote possibility, and was stunned to discover that the kitten had it.
Stanley died the day after his trip to the vet’s. Urgent testing is now underway to see if he infected any of the 10 people he’s estimated to have bitten or scratched, as well as other animals he may have come into contact with.
If uncontained, health officials estimate the disease could spread and impact 7 million people in the central US. ‘We haven’t had rabies in forever,’ said Sharon Mix, the vet, who noted when she saw the kitten’s pupils were different sizes.
Genetic testing revealed the kitten had a variant of rabies that is normally linked to raccoons east of Appalachia and has never been seen before in Nebraska.
Douglas County Health officials health officials scrambled to vaccinate 1,000 raccoons in the local area to prevent more infections. Rabies is considered 100 percent fatal in humans if it is not treated before symptoms begin. County Health Director Lindsay Huse told The Nebraska Examiner: ‘It’s just something that can snowball very quickly.
‘The goal is to prevent this raccoon variant of rabies from establishing itself here in our area. This would cause a substantial impact if it happened and put many people in danger.’ If left uncontained, the CDC estimated the virus could expand in a 24-mile radius per year.
Over five years, the rabies strain could spread to South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas putting an estimated 7 million Americans at risk.
‘We’ve never had a nine-alarm fire like this,’ said Richard Chipman, the coordinator of the national rabies program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Health officials contact traced ten people, including the Wahls, their friend and veterinary staffers who had been scratched or bitten by Stanley so they could get four doses of rabies vaccine and one dose of human rabies immune globulin to neutralize the virus, a treatment that can cost up to $8,000 per person.
A team of state and federal officials spent ten days trapping and vaccinating animals — 753 raccoons, 41 skunks, four feral cats and one red fox — in the surrounding area.
Officials also placed 18,000 vaccine packets out in nature in a five-mile radius to vaccinate wildlife they could not capture. ‘As they chew on it, they are bathing their mouth and tonsils with the vaccine, and that starts the immune reaction,’ Chipman said.
