A traveling petting zoo. Hundreds of unsuspecting visitors. Adorable baby goats. A virus that attacks the nervous system and is almost always fatal once symptoms start.
If this were the first five minutes of a rage-virus movie, nobody would accuse the screenwriter of subtlety.
It is not a movie. It happened in North Carolina over roughly a month this summer, and 284 people have now been evaluated by local health departments for possible rabies exposure.
Before anyone starts boarding up a window: no human infections have been linked to the goats. North Carolina has not reported a human rabies case since 2011. What there is instead is a public health situation with an unusually cinematic setup.
What happened
Farm Adventures is a mobile petting zoo based in Harmony, in Iredell County. Four baby goats in its care are believed to have contracted rabies. Three tested positive at the North Carolina State Laboratory of Public Health on August 28. The fourth was not tested and is presumed infected.
According to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, the likely source was a skunk that got into the goats’ pen in late July. A skunk walks into a barn. That is the inciting incident. That is the cold open.
The goats were considered potentially infectious from July 28 through August 27. During that month they did not sit quietly in a pen. They worked. NCDHHS documented 10 off-site events across seven counties, in addition to the Farm Adventures site in Harmony. The counties are Iredell, Mecklenburg, Davidson, Watauga, Burke, Davie and Durham. The list of stops includes a back-to-school bash, Masonic picnic grounds, assisted living facilities and several private events.
Baby goats are the whole business model of a petting zoo. People pick them up. People bottle-feed them. Children put their faces very close to them, on purpose, while an adult takes a photo. That close contact matters because rabies can spread when infected saliva reaches broken skin or the eyes, nose or mouth. Bottle-feeding, carrying and cuddling the animals created more opportunities for that kind of exposure.
The numbers
As of the latest state information, 284 people have been evaluated by local health departments and 213 were advised to receive rabies post-exposure prophylaxis, or PEP, the preventive treatment used after a qualifying rabies exposure. Others have gone directly to their own healthcare providers, so 284 is not a complete count of everyone who has asked the question.
Worth repeating clearly, because these numbers travel badly on social media: no human rabies infections have been reported in connection with the goats. Evaluated means assessed for risk. Post-exposure prophylaxis is the thing you get so that you never develop rabies in the first place. NCDHHS has also noted that the transmission risk from livestock is lower than from a wild animal bite.
Rabies was already a horror virus
Horror did not have to work hard here. Rabies infects the central nervous system. Once symptoms appear it is nearly always fatal, which is the sort of sentence that usually requires a movie studio. It is also preventable, reliably, if treatment starts before symptoms do. The entire drama of rabies lives inside that gap.
That mechanism has fed decades of infection horror. The Rage virus in 28 Days Later is fictional and moves at a speed no real rabies infection does, but rabies already possesses several of the qualities infection horror exploits: neurological disease, behavioral changes and an almost absolute need to intervene before symptoms appear.
The part that stays with you
Consider the shape of it. One of the most feared viruses on the planet spent a month riding around North Carolina inside animals that were specifically brought to events because people wanted to hold them.
Apparently the apocalypse does not arrive on horseback. It arrives in a petting zoo trailer and asks if you would like to bottle-feed it.
Anyone who visited Farm Adventures or one of its events between July 28 and August 27 should contact their local health department.
