Oral rabies vaccine baits each year for wildlife is having an impact

More than 20 years of air-dropping and ground-placing in New Hampshire and Vermont, tens to hundreds of thousands of oral rabies vaccine baits each year for wildlife is having an impact in reducing, and in many areas, eliminating the spread of rabies, officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Thursday. “We’ve actually moved the barrier from the Canadian border south 20 miles in the last few years and we monitor everything in that border and in the drop zone itself, which is another 20 miles wide,” said David Allaben, wildlife biologist and the New Hampshire and Vermont state director of USDA’s Animal Plant Health and Inspection Service, which coordinates the aerial drops and follows up in September and October with the live-trapping of wildlife to determine the effectiveness.