Mad Dogs: The New Rabies Plague
- ISBN-10
- 0890968047
- ISBN-13
- 9780890968048
- Series
- Mad Dogs
- Pages
- 215
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1998
- Publisher
- Texas A&M University Press
- Author
- Don Finley
Description
Rabies, one of humanity's most ancient and feared diseases, has spread rapidly among the canines of South Texas and in raccoons on the eastern seaboard. The United States, with the world's most complex rabies problems, has seemed helpless in the face of this dangerous outbreak, the worst in decades.
In Mad Dogs: The New Rabies Plague, Don Finley chronicles the epidemic, the politics of response to it, and the most ambitious American attempt yet to erect a barrier against the disease -- in Texas. He tells the stories of those who have been plagued by rabies, and those who have accepted the charge to end the plague.
In South Texas, normally timid coyotes have become fearless, challenging ranch dogs twice their size, attacking an infant on her porch swing, and menacing oil field workers. More ominously, they have infected hundreds of pet dogs, resulting in the exposure of some fifteen hundred people in South Texas to the dreaded disease. Three people, including a fourteen-year-old boy, have died, and the leading edge of the plague line is approaching San Antonio, one of the nation's ten largest cities.
Despite the fact that European nations and Canada have nearly eliminated rabies among wild animals, the virus has been able to spread in the United States because the federal government is unique in its stance that rabies is a local health problem. Controversy over who will pay for a federally approved vaccine is ongoing, even as the virus crosses state and national lines.
The struggle to develop an effective oral rabies vaccination program in the United States began three decades ago. Finley describes the professional feuds, often between scientists and public health officials, thathindered the efforts. In 1995, the USDA granted permission to drop an experimental, genetically engineered vaccine over nearly fifteen thousand square miles of South Texas brushlands in an effort to stop the spread of the disease.
Finley's straightforward language, free of either jargon or hysteria, is a welcome approach in describing the disease's destructive effects. His rare inside look into the politics and the science of disease control within public bureaucracies will engross those interested in science and public health issues, pet owners and wildlife enthusiasts, and those fascinated by infectious disease threats.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
Mad Dogs and Englishmen: A Grand Tour of the British Empire at its Height
By Ashley JacksonIn this unique book, Ashley Jackson takes the reader on a richly informative tour of the empire 'on which the sun never set', examining the representations of empire that informed the world view of hundreds of millions of people.
-
Mad Dogs, Englishmen, and the Errant Anthropologist: Fieldwork in Malaysia
By Douglas Raybeck... Kelantan. After having been bitten, he tried to return home by bicycle, an unwise and costly effort, as the exercise ... Mat (whose full name is Mohammed bin Su) of the jaga, one of my key informants, is no longer young and is now ...
-
The Mad Dogs Girls
By Robert P. BennJames Maddox lives the perfect life; a beautiful wife, two wonderful daughters, a good job and a lovely home at the beach.
-
Hollywood Mad Dogs: A Novel
By Edwin "Bud" ShrakeIn Hollywood Mad Dogs, Shrake deftly satirizes a world where a screenwriter is supplied with a bag of cocaine and given a week to write a script, a star demands that a pet cat be his sidekick on the trail, and two competing box office ...
-
Mad Dog and Englishman
By J M Hayes“Actually,” Heather English confessed around a mouthful of chili-cheese burger “I think Mom may have the impression ... “Mom taught me not to scream, not unless it'll do me some good. ... In fact, he was the source Mad Dog & Englishman 75.
-
Mad Dog
By Dandi Daley MackallI gaze at the stars and try again, but it's a no go. No beagles in my sky. I shake my head. “Nothing.” “Try again, Wes,” Hank urges, getting a little too big brotherly. “You know how people talk about the dog days of summer?
-
Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840–1920
By Jessica WangOn the dog vaccination campaign that followed a major rabies outbreak in Bali in 2008, see Wasik and Murphy, Rabid, ch. 8, esp. 208–21. Note: the WHO updates its rabies fact sheet periodically, and some of the content may have changed ...
-
Mad Dogs of Trieste: New & Selected Poems
By Janine Pommy-VegaFor this major retrospective volume, she has selected the best lyrics, protests, portraits, and elegies from her first twenty-five years of writing.
-
The Mad Dog: Stories
By Heinrich BöllA New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature In this collection of stories, written between 1938 and 1945, Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) recalls Erich Maria Remarque in his ability to depict war and its ...
-
Mad Dogs
By Brian HodgeSmalltime actor Jamey Sheppard, who's driving from California to Arizona to get married, makes a fateful pit stop at a highway "Gulp 'n' Go," where a drunken deputy mistakes him for Duncan MacGregor, the real-life crook Sheppard played on ...