“Veterinary epidemiologists feel this disease is going to be pretty established throughout the country by next year.” “Once the virus gets into the wild-rabbit population, there’s no way to stop it from rapidly spreading and becoming endemic,” said Graham, head of Cummings School’s zoological companion animal medicine (ZCAM) service. It also has been detected in wild, pet, and feral rabbits in California, Colorado, Texas, Nevada, and Washington. However, this spring the virus killed black-tailed jackrabbits and cottontails in New Mexico and Arizona.
“For example, there was one situation where a woman working in a restaurant that served rabbit brought the virus home to her own rabbits.”Īt first, the illness did not appear to affect wild species in the U.S. “We’ve tried to keep this virus out of the country, but there have been sporadic outbreaks in domestic rabbits,” said Jennifer Graham, a veterinarian at the Henry and Lois Foster Hospital for Small Animals. (Australia and New Zealand purposefully introduced the virus to try to control their numbers of feral rabbits.)
It soon spread around the world via human travel. The virus was first diagnosed in domestic rabbits in China in 1984, but it is believed to have originated in wild European rabbits.
The fatal virus-which causes an Ebola-like disease called rabbit hemorrhagic disease-already has been reported in the western and southwestern United States. An emerging virus threatens both wild and pet rabbits in the United States.
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