A deadly first-of-its-kind rabies infection has been found in a new species of animal.
Scientists say they have identified an outbreak of the deadly infection in seals – making it the first time the virus has been detected in sea mammals. It followed the discovery of 24 Cape fur seals dead or euthanised in various locations on South Africa‘s west and south coast, which later tested positive for rabies.
Rabies, which affects mammals and can be passed onto humans, is almost always fatal once symptoms appear. It spreads via saliva, typically through bites, but also sometimes when animals lick and groom each other.
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AP)
The seals live in close proximity to people in numerous places in South Africa, especially on beaches around the city of Cape Town. The city has issued warnings to locals, said Gregg Oelofse, Cape Town’s head of coastal and environmental management.
The virus has long been seen in wild animals such as raccoons, coyotes, foxes, jackals and in domestic dogs. But it had never been recorded spreading among marine mammals. The only other known case of rabies in a sea mammal was in a ringed seal in Norway’s Svalbard islands in the early 1980s. But this seal had likely been infected by a rabid arctic fox, researchers said, and there was no evidence of rabies spreading among seals there.
Authorities in South Africa first discovered rabies in Cape fur seals in June after a dog was bitten by a seal on a Cape Town beach. The dog became infected with rabies, prompting rabies tests on brain samples from 135 seal carcasses that researchers had already collected since 2021. Around 20 new samples also were collected and more positives have come back on subsequent tests.
Scientists are now trying to work out how rabies was passed to the seals, whether it is spreading widely among their large colonies and what can be done to contain it. Greg Hofmeyr, a marine biologist who studies seals in South Africa, said: “It’s all very, very new. A lot of research is required … there are a lot of unknowns here.”
Approximately two million seals migrate back and forth between South Africa, Namibia and Angola along Africa’s south and west coast every year. The most likely possibility for the new infections, according to state veterinarian Dr. Lesley van Helden, is that rabies was first passed onto seals by jackals in Namibia, where the wolf-like animals hunt seal pups on the coastline. The genes of the rabies virus found in the seals matched the rabies in black-backed jackals in Namibia. Close examination also showed rabies was being transmitted between seals because most of the virus sequences were closely related, she said. Dr van Helden added: “So, it’s basically established itself in the seal population and it’s being maintained by them biting each other.”
No cases of animal-to-human transmission have been reported in the UK since 1902, though rabies is relatively common in some parts of the world. In 2018, a British resident died from rabies two months after being bitten by a cat while on holiday in Morocco.
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