There are different strains of rabies, with the raccoon variant being one of the most common. Dennis Slate is wildlife rabies coordinator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He says the goal of raccoon vaccination is to prevent an east coast outbreak of raccoon rabies from spreading west.

" We have a very good public health system in the United States and people are not dying of rabies. The total number of deaths each year is typically one or two. Anything we do with oral vaccination is probably not going to influence the human death rate. What it will do if successful is contain raccoon rabies and not infect much of the rest of the United States."

By distributing vaccinated fish-cakes between Lake Erie and Alabama, Slate hopes to create a barrier of immune animals, through which the disease will not spread. Slate says with such a wide area to cover, hand-feeding the raccoons might not be the best option

" In an airplane we can distribute baits with a computerized distribution system where you can put essentially about 12-thousand baits on the ground an hour. If you had to do all that by ground it would be extremely inefficient."

If the program's successful, Slate says, vaccine drops could move further eastwards, progressively reducing the number of rabid raccoons until the disease is wiped out. The vaccine being used is also effective in coyotes and foxes, but not skunks and bats which also carry rabies.

More information is available on the web at GreenWorks.tv. I'm Brad Linder.