Veterinarians and rabbit owners are racing to protect bunnies as a hemorrhagic disease spreads
Driving his car through a Tennessee ice storm in early February was a risk that veterinarian Logan Kopp knew he had to take. The reward: rescuing four vials containing 40 doses of a new vaccine for a highly contagious and fatal virus afflicting rabbits. A storm-related power outage had knocked out refrigeration at Priest Lake Veterinary Hospital in Nashville-Antioch, Tenn., threatening to degrade the vaccines doses in cold storage there.
RHDV2 is not known to infect humans. But human movement of rabbits is likely a significant factor in the disease’s spread, with geographically random cases popping up in domestic rabbits, says Bryan Richards, emerging disease coordinator at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis. That clinic has since vaccinated about 170 rabbits, 110 of them at a drive-through vaccination event hosted by the clinic in March. But there are a lot more rabbits out there: about 1.7 million households in the U.S. keep at least one as a pet, according to the American Pet Products Association. In some areas of the country, vaccine appointments are hard to find. One of Kopp’s clients drove nine hours round trip to get her bunny vaccinated.
Scientists are worried that RHDV2 could threaten the riparian brush rabbit population, along with other rare or endangered species of lagomorphs. A total of 24 rabbit species, or closely related species, worldwide are designated as endangered or vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.
Vaccines have also reached the endangered Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit, the smallest species in North America, under a recovery effort led by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Clifford explains that while not all rabbits can be vaccinated, “in these special circumstances, we do think vaccination can have an impact.”
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