Here is a piece of a Germen News Website:
https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/suedafrika-tollwut-bei-robben-vor-kapstadt-nachgewiesen-a-cf90e892-7b6f-44bf-a4dc-10745ab4f475
Thanks for the link. It's interesting to see how a virus that can potentially infect any mammalians managed to spread to sea mammalians.
Nice to get your reply🙂
Not special mean, just... if my feeling is true, this event might someone deliberately dropped the virus like corona.
If they scared of water, maybe they will move to human's area. I don't know the distance between seaside and city/country, or local medical level.
And this big devil, I really felt it... so I hope some people pray for this question.
I don't think it is created. Rabies is a very special and well spread virus we have lived with for a very long time, so we have a bit of knowledge and experience about it.
Like you said though, a rabid animal is more susceptible to go to human areas like cities/villages, not because it's afraid of water, but more because rabies changes the behaviour of its host and makes it wander more, and rise its "sociability" or agressivity in many species. For instance, in France and maybe Europe in general, half of the attack from wolves on humans during the last centuries (before the extermination of wolf in France) could be attributed to rabies... This obviously gave a very bad reputation to wolves, that, otherwise, would avoid people and settlements...
The reasons for that lies in the fact that rabies attacks the nervous system, which makes it a very scary virus becausse once it reaches the brain, you can be considered dead and, usually, the host movements becomes erratic.
That being said, you can imagine that with such a disease, scientists have worked on it. Like I said earlier, in France or UK at least, authorities have focused on vaccinating wild foxes because they are the main vectors of rabies here and it has been a very successful campaign for there is no native case of rabies anymore here.
There are also 2 other solutions against it: preventive shot as to get a vaccine against rabies, or getting a vaccine within 24h after the bite.
Hence, there are probably solutions for the problem with fur seals:
- There is a vaccination campaign on the seals to fix the problem, which would be nice, but maybe the vaccine has to be developped if the virus is a little different for these animals.
- People get vaccinated before.
- People whio gets bitten (because they didn't stay away from seals that comes close to them or displayed a weird behaviour) go to the hospital, even for a small bite
- The rabies infecting fur seals have issues to spread to other species and there is no need to worry too much. This seems to be the caser - for now, maybe because the virus is a little bit different, or because of salted water, UV...
In any case, you are right to be worried about it, as it is not a funny disease, it's dangerous and should be deal with properly, but unlike for covid and new zoonosis, I think this one is probably not as hard to handle with. We have some experience with it and some countries already have shown that it's possible to live in rabid-free regions 😉