No I don’t mean that. Reservoirs species are infected with variants of the rabies virus that are host-adapted and thus readily transmissible between species members. Dogs used to be reservoirs in the U.S., but they are no longer. Not because dogs are immune from rabies, but because the dog variant of the rabies virus was effectively eliminated.
A sustained chain of transmission is what keeps the virus present in a population, and you don’t get this sustained chain outside of a reservoir. Variants of the rabies virus also circulate independently from one another. So killing off the bats will have no effect on rabies in raccoons and vice versa.
There is little evidence that a prolonged asymptomatic carrier state exists for rabies wherein animals shed the virus with no clinical disease.
I don’t understand what you’re not understanding. Do you doubt the existence of non-bat reservoirs? Most of the animals that serve as reservoirs are not solitary animals; opportunities for encountering each other are numerous enough to facilitate viral transmission without causing complete decimation. Also, an infected animal can shed the virus up to 10 days before signs of disease. That’s plenty of time to pass the baton to another creature. Incubation periods are pretty variable as well.
The disease does kill them and yet they do serve as reservoirs. This shouldn’t be hard to accept unless you’re working off some flawed assumptions about the disease.
This is one a few things about wildlife theories I still don’t accept, I can see it acting like a wildfire and eventually running out of fuel until a new fire is lit. This would act very much like it was endemic to a population and hard to distinguish aside from identifying strains as you mentioned, I admit this has me rethinking my doubt on the issue. But then again couldn’t the bats also carry various strains some of which more successfully transmitted to different species again giving the impression that the disease was endemic?
In some ways the disease acts like a disease carried by mosquitos but in this case bats could act the same way.
One thing interesting about foxes and coyotes is that they have a high percentage of unsuccessful attacks on things like raccoons and foxes. In the fight they bite each other. As a population dwindles from disease in an area the opportunity for interaction and transmission decreases greatly. It just doesn’t add up.
Well, if this were the case, you’d think evidence for it would’ve turned up by now. But nothing has refuted current understanding of the virus.
I really want to help you understand this but I can’t understand some of your assertions, like this one. Foxes and coyotes attack raccoons and foxes? What?
Coyotes attack raccoons and foxes as food sources, very often unsuccessfully where both animals sustain bites. Foxes will sometimes attack small raccoons and possibly skunks. Unsuccessful kills are an opportunity for the disease to jump species. I would imagine weakened sick animals are readily preyed on so it wouldn’t even have to be an unsuccessful kill to spread. I don’t see how it would not run out of fuel eventually.
A rabid coyote (infected with a coyote variant) could most certainly bite and infect a raccoon, if that’s what you mean by jumping species. Likewise, foxes and other animals (such as feral cats) in areas where raccoon rabies is enzootic often turn up infected with the raccoon variant. I wouldn’t really call this “jumping species” though because spillover hosts rarely infect other animals; they represent breaks in the chain of transmission.
Rabies doesn’t run out “fuel” for the same reason HIV doesn’t. The incubation period is sometimes on the order of several months, the infectious period is long enough to enable low levels of transmission to others, and the transmission rate is not high enough to cause high prevalence. The animals that serve as reservoirs also have the right sociobiology to keep the virus circulating at all times.
This does give me a much different understanding of the disease. I always thought that transmissions rates were very high with the right type of exposure. I also thought that the cycle seldom lasted over 60 days from exposure to death.
I occasionally here of rabid animals captured in Los Angeles county and rarely suggestions of small outbreaks.