OHIO — Jeff Raines, a rabies biologist for United States Department of Agriculture, Wildlife Services, has been working to control the disease in Ohio for more than a decade.

“Right now, for 2023, we’ve only found one animal that has tested positive for rabies,” Rains said. “But the problem with rabies is, unless humans or pets are vaccinated, it’s almost 100% fatal.”

Raines and his co-worker, Brenna Wells, have been distributing hundreds of oral rabies vaccine baits on the eastern side of Ohio.

“[The vaccine baits] are coated in a wax covering, and they have a very sweet, almost vanilla-like smell to them,” Wells said.

The pair throws hundreds of the small, green baits that contain the oral rabies vaccine out their car window. The goal is to help eliminate raccoon-variant rabies in Ohio.

“You know, it's just the risk to human health and safety and pet health and safety by having the rabies virus on the landscape,” Raines said. “Rabies is only found in eastern Ohio, so we use these baits to help eliminate it, but it also creates a barrier to where the rabies virus isn’t spreading any farther west then where it is currently found.”

Each time Wells tosses one of the baits out the car window, Raines makes sure to record it by clicking a small box, called a POI device.

“I push a button, and it takes a GPS location of where we have thrown those baits,” Raines said. “Once we are complete, we can go back and pull the GPS locations off of this device and put them on a map just to get a picture of where we baited and each one of the cities that we are working.”

If one of your pets finds one of these vaccine baits, Raines said, it is rare for them to get sick.

“These baits are not harmful to pets,” he explained. “There is the possibility of a reaction to them, but it’s not very common.”

The USDA will continue distributing the oral rabies vaccines throughout Ohio by car and air over the next several weeks.