Ontario is on pace to finish 2017 with about half as many confirmed cases of rabies as 2016, but more than in the rest of this decade combined.
As of Oct. 31, 133 animals had been diagnosed with rabies across Ontario. The majority of those animals have been raccoons, as the province continues to experience a rabies outbreak that came to light in late 2015 when a raccoon got into a fight with two dogs in the back on an animal control van in Hamilton.
The outbreak’s peak occurred in 2016, when there were 288 cases of the virus diagnosed in Ontario. Prior to that year, Ontario was seeing fewer than 30 cases of rabies per year, usually in bats. The number of confirmed cases of rabies in Ontario hadn’t topped 100 since 2007.
There were 10 rabid raccoons, four rabid bats and one rabid skunk found in Ontario in October.
The province has been combatting the outbreak by delivering massive quantities of packages containing the rabies vaccine to forests and other treed areas over the past two years.
