Health officials snuff tularemia outbreak

Dallas-Texas state and federal officials smothered a tularemia outbreak in captive prairie dogs.

The outbreak has been isolated to a Texas animal distributor in DentonCounty, North Texas. About 250 animals were thought to be infected withtularemia and shipped to areas of Texas, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Virginia,West Virginia, Washington, Mississippi, Nevada and overseas.

Dr. Joe Garrett, of the Texas Department of Health's (TDH) Zoonosis ControlDivision, tells DVM Newsmagazine that containing this tularemia outbreakwas much less challenging than stopping spread in the wild.

"There is tularemia that occurs naturally in Texas, Arkansas andsome of the other states, but in this case it was not an outbreak in nature.It was not an outbreak in a commercial facility," Garrett says.

Officials just had to trace shipments and then go collect the animals,which each state did.

The animals began to show signs of the disease last summer and subsequentlyan investigation of the situation began with TDH and the Centers for DiseaseControl. The animals were captured in the wild in South Dakota, he adds.

Tularemia, often referred to as rabbit fever, is a zoonotic, bacterialdisease. It is actually a small, gram-negative coccobacillus and is knownto affect more than 250 species. Cases of tularemia are occasionally diagnosedin dogs and it can be fatal to cats. Ticks are also vectors for the causativebacterium.