Good News From Appalachia: Take It From the Raccoons

For thirty years we've been dropping vaccines out of airplanes onto the mountains below. The lesson we learned goes a lot further than wildlife.

These trash pandas have become an unlikely gold standard for effective policy guardrails that transcend generations.

Happy Sunday, everyone. Are you ready for some good news? This one comes with a side of fish-flavored ravioli, so stick with me.

Unfortunately, we have to start with a little bit of bad news to give you the full picture.

Last week the CDC warned that animal rabies is up across the country, and human exposures are up with it. That warning came from an agency that just lost a quarter of its staff to this administration’s cuts, with rabies testing paused since April. Its rabies team was reportedly cut down to a single expert. So we’ve got a rabies summer arriving at an agency that’s been hollowed out, run by public health leadership I wouldn’t trust to hold my coffee.

But, I want to tell you why it could be so much worse than it is AND why you should feel hopeful about the future of this country because of it.

Every summer, low-flying planes pass over the Appalachian Mountains, and out the back comes a steady rain of little brown cubes about the size of a matchbox. They smell like fish. Raccoons, who have the palate of a college freshman at 2 a.m., think they’ve won the lottery.

Inside each cube is a rabies vaccine. The raccoon bites through, swallows it, and about a month later it’s immune. Vaccinate enough of them in one place and the virus simply runs out of animals to move through. It hits a wall of immune wildlife and stops.

That wall runs roughly from Maine down to Alabama, with about six and a half million baits a year, rebuilt every single year since 1995. The program’s whole job is to keep raccoon rabies from crossing the Appalachians into the rest of the country. Raccoons live in all 48 of the lower states. Raccoon rabies has never once made it west of that line.

And when we’ve really committed to it, we haven’t just contained this stuff. We’ve erased it.

In 1988, a strain of rabies that had lived in city dogs jumped into coyotes along the Texas border and started marching north. Everything this country built in the 1950s to handle rabies was useless against it. South Texas reported 122 cases in 1994, and 142 the year after.

So they started dropping bait. Cases fell to 20, then 6, then 5, then zero by the year 2000. Not one since 2005. On September 7th, 2008, the CDC declared the United States free of canine rabies. Forget containment. It was just gone.

Then we did it several more times. Most recently, on Long Island, raccoon rabies showed up in 2004 and they again spread bait until it was gone. That one cost $2.6 million and paid for itself purely on the shots and lab tests nobody ended up needing.

Now, to be fair, this isn’t the main reason Americans almost never die of rabies. That comes from vaccinating our pets and from a treatment that works nearly every time if you get it soon enough. But that treatment runs eleven to fourteen thousand dollars a course, and tens of thousands of Americans need it every year.

Every place the virus can’t reach is a place where that bill never arrives, and where somebody’s kid never has to go through the difficulties faced without it.

So yes, this summer’s surge is real. But it’s unfolding on a map that has been shrinking for thirty years.

But it could be so much worse. It isn’t, and the reason it isn’t is that people we’ll never meet decided this was a problem we could end, and then flew the planes, year after boring year, long after anyone was paying attention. A few of the old timers where I’m from called this kind of unglamorous labor “choppin’ wood” and considered it some of the most noble work to be done.

And that’s why a pile of fish-flavored ravioli ended up in a column about the state of the country.

Because we are living through a stress test of every guardrail this country ever built. For years now we’ve watched an administration push against the laws, the norms, the written words of the Constitution, and we’ve watched a lot of those guardrails bend.

Some broke. But a striking number of them held, and they held for the same reason the rabies wall holds. Somebody built them on purpose, generations ago, specifically so that a moment like this one would have something to push against.

That’s the thing about prevention: it’s invisible when it works. Nobody throws a parade for the rabies case that didn’t happen, or the crisis the law stopped before it started.

The work gets done by people who will never be thanked, protecting people who will never know they were protected. It is the least glamorous kind of patriotism there is, and our country would never work without it.

Sometimes it feels like American democracy is crawling towards a halt. As humorous as it sounds, raccoon rabies treatment is a reminder of how we can solve hard problems when we work together.

Which brings me to the hopeful part: we will have new leadership in this country soon. And whoever takes the oath next is going to inherit a long, exhausting list of things to fix.

The easy promise for the next president to make is simply to restore what was lost. But putting things back the way they were is how you guarantee that, one day, things will get broken the exact same way.

The harder promise is to find the places where our democracy gave way this time, the specific weaknesses we watched get exploited in broad daylight, and close them for good.

Because (and please pardon the absurd metaphor) here’s the lesson the raccoons are trying to teach us: we don’t just owe a debt to the generations who built the walls that are holding right now. We owe the same thing forward to the Americans who’ll be alive the next time a creature like this comes crawling out of the woods.

And one always does. The fever always comes back. The only question is whether we’ve done the thankless, year-after-year work of making sure that when it does, it has less and less left to move through.

So let the raccoons of Appalachia make you smile today, with their little masked faces and their terrible taste in food. But also let them remind you of the people who kept the rabies out, never got a thank-you, and flew the planes anyway.

That’s the job now. Hold the walls that are holding. Rebuild the ones that fell. And build them stronger than we found them, for the people who’ll need them long after we’re gone.

I’ll keep choppin’ wood. How ‘bout you?

And that, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.

— Adam