TUCSON – Chris Sabo was hiking in northern Arizona in mid-April when he felt the teeth gripping his ankle. Latched onto his foot was a rabid gray fox.
Sabo captured his persistent attacker by stepping on its neck and holding it down. The fox died soon after.
“It was obvious it wasn't in its right mind, and it's unfortunate,” he said.
Sabo, who works at the Deschutes National Forest in central Oregon's Cascade Mountain range, had to receive shots of a rabies vaccine.
Across Arizona, there have been a higher-than-normal 54 cases of rabies reported since January, some of them, like Sabo's encounter with the fox, involving attacks on humans. State and national experts say the state's record of 169 cases in 2005 is likely to be broken.
Arizona's surging population and increase in the number of pets providing prey for carnivores have been factors in the state's soaring rabies cases, said Dr. Charles Rupprecht, chief of the rabies program with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Not only are there more people outdoors and in recreational areas who can report seeing wild animals acting unusually, but the environmental landscape has been altered dramatically as development pushes into wilderness areas, leading to more encounters between humans and animals, said Rupprecht and David Bergman, another federal official. Bergman is the Arizona director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service-Wildlife Services.
In the Arizona cases reported as of late April, 19 people and 64 domestic animals were exposed to animals with confirmed cases of rabies. That included attacks by six animals on nine people.
Among the attacks were a nationally publicized case in which a rabid mountain lion scratched a 10-year-old boy on a Tonto National Forest trailhead north of Phoenix in March before an adult who was with him fatally shot the cat. Nine people who were with the boy, Paul Schalow of El Mirage, Ariz., had to be vaccinated against rabies because they touched the animal without gloves after it was dead.
The mountain lion attack was a rare incident, said Dr. Elisabeth Lawaczezk, Arizona's public health veterinarian.
“You're more likely to be struck by lightning,” Lawaczezk said.
In April, two University of Arizona scientists hiking in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson were bitten by a rabid bobcat before one of them bludgeoned the animal to death with a geologist's hammer. Both received treatment after the attack.
Rabies is nearly always fatal if medical attention is not provided immediately.
Rupprecht, the CDC official, said there are a couple of “hot spots going on around the country” when it comes to rabies. Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Texas are all experiencing gray fox rabies outbreaks. Arizona is the only Southwest state to also have skunk rabies cases.
Arizona seems to be leading the way in incidents.
“It's a little unusual for this third of a year to have that number of cases, when you consider that most of the cases should occur now through the fall,” Rupprecht said.
