Animal bites are on the rise in Union County.
Marcia Dreiseidel, director of environmental health at the Union County Health Department (UCHD), said the county has seen an uptick in animals bites this year. She said usually, there are about 75 to 125 animals bites that occur each year. However, for this year, 88 animal bites as of July 23, “seems like a lot.”
“Most of them are owned animals and most of them are provoked,” Dreiseidel said. “With most of them, there is a reason (they bite).”
According to information from the UCHD, as of July 23, this year’s data is comprised of 62 bites from dogs, 24 from cats, and one each from a rabbit, bat and horse.
Dreiseidel said bites typically happen to family members or those familiar with the animal.
According to an email by UCHD public information officer Jennifer Thrush, while the bite reports seem to be up in comparison to other years, “it is not excessively elevated” and “could be due to an anomaly, the growth in the county, improved reporting or many other factors we cannot calculate.”
Dreiseidel said the UCHD is always looking to see if any bites were caused by animals infected with rabies. However, a case of humans contracting rabies through bites has been rare, she said.
She said pet owners should get their pets “all of the recommended vaccines,” with rabies in specific.
“Get your animals vaccinated,” Dreiseidel said.
She also said animal owners need to report to the UCHD if they are bitten by their animals. However, she said a big concern among owners is they don’t report bite incidents for fear of losing their animals.
“One of the big (misconceptions) involving animal bites is we’re going to take animals away from (owners),” Dreiseidel said. “We have no place to quarantine animals and we don’t euthanize them.”
She said the UCHD’s job is to make sure an animal either gets a rabies vaccine before a bite happens or when an animal is in quarantine after a bite happens.
In an email, Thrush said since 1980, the county has had four cases where an animal tested positive for rabies, and they were all bats. She said the positive cases were discovered in 2007, 2013, 2014 and 2017.
In October 1993, the health department passed a resolution stating that all dogs need to be vaccinated, and all cats would need to be vaccinated in an outbreak situation. However, Dreiseidel said it’s difficult to track if every animal in the county has been vaccinated.
Thrush said rather than focusing the department’s efforts on tracking, it instead encourages education about getting animals vaccinated and understanding what rabies is.
Because most bite cases are among domesticated animals, Thrush said it’s easy to determine if that animal has rabies and if they need to quarantine it because their owners are usually cooperative.