Rabies in animals
As a result, they tend to behave bizarrely and often aggressively, increasing the chances that they will bite another animal or a person and transmit the disease.
"[11] In 1931, Dr. Joseph Lennox Pawan of Trinidad in the West Indies, a government bacteriologist, found Negri bodies in the brain of a bat with unusual habits.
[14] Recent data sequencing suggests recombination events in an American bat led the modern rabies virus to gain the head of a G-protein ectodomain thousands of years ago.
[15] Cryptic rabies refers to unidentified infections, which are mainly traced back to particularly virulent forms in silver-haired and tricolor bats.
This absence of typical symptoms can often cause major delays in treatment and diagnosis in both animals and humans, as the required post-exposure prophylaxis and dFAT tests may not be run.
The virus is often passed on during fights between cats or other animals and is transmitted by bites, saliva or through mucous membranes and fresh wounds.
Symptoms have a rapid onset and can include unusual aggression, restlessness, lethargy, anorexia, weakness, disorientation, paralysis and seizures.
[27] Vaccination programs in Latin America have been effective at protecting cattle from rabies, along with other approaches such as the culling of vampire bat populations.
Rabies can be contracted in horses if they interact with rabid animals in their pasture, usually through being bitten (e.g. by vampire bats)[25][23] on the muzzle or lower limbs.
Signs include aggression, incoordination, head-pressing, circling, lameness, muscle tremors, convulsions, colic and fever.
[37] Monkeys as an infectious agent are often a concern for individuals residing in or travelling to developing countries as they are the second most common source of rabies after dogs in many of these places.
Symptoms include weakness in limbs, head tremors, low appetite, nasal discharge, and death within three to four days.
When cases are reported of pet skunks biting a human, the animals are frequently killed in order to be tested for rabies.
[18] Humans exposed to the rabies virus must begin post-exposure prophylaxis before the disease can progress to the central nervous system.
Wolves develop an exceptionally severe aggressive state when infected and can bite numerous people in a single attack.
With the reduction of rabies in Europe and North America, few rabid wolf attacks have been recorded, though some still occur annually in the Middle East.
[42] One of the largest land mammals on the continent of Asia, these elephants typically live in India, Indonesia, Nepal, and Cambodia: countries that have ongoing rabies epidemics.
Most cases of rabies in rodents reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States have been found among groundhogs (woodchucks).
[45] The long-dormant phase of this virus makes horizontal transfer possible in this stage through breeding and typical injuries from territory fights.
In the same geographic region, the greater kudu, a species of antelope in Namibia, have also suffered enormous outbreaks of rabies in their populations.
During the first epidemic from 1997 to 1996, as much as 20% of the population succumbed to the disease; phylogenetic analyses likewise proved that the rapid spread was largely by horizontal transfer.
Kudu are a large factor in the agriculture and economy of Namibia, but their status as wildlife makes prevention of the disease much more difficult.
[48] Birds were first artificially infected with rabies in 1884, with work being done on a large variety of species including domestic fowl and pigeons.
