Medical Fund for Caretakers of Rabid Kitten

A group of friends in our community were unexpectedly exposed to a rare strain of rabies when they took care of a stray kitten last September. This community GoFundMe campaign will help with the astronomical medical costs some of them incurred from post-exposure rabies treatments.

How funds will be used: If untreated, rabies is nearly always a fatal disease. The necessary rabies treatment (post-exposure prophylaxis) consists of multiple shots administered at an initial Emergency Room visit with three followup visits, and includes a dose of human rabies immune globulin and a series of four rabies vaccine shots over a two-week period. Even after insurance and available drug-manufacturer assistance, the affected families’ combined total is $13,250 for out-of-pocket medical bills. Contributions to this fund will be distributed to each household according to the percentage of their medical costs (which are $6,020, $4,670, $1,410, and $1,150 respectively).

Community Support for Expensive Life-Saving Treatments

The group’s concern for the kitten along with the fast actions of an astute veterinary team led local and national health officials to identify and respond to a potential public health crisis. This response is thought to have curbed a dangerous rabies outbreak that could have cost our community tens of millions of dollars to control, and put an increased number of people and pets at risk of rabies exposure. Your financial contribution honors the community members for doing right by the kitten, which protected our community in the process.

Please read more about their story and the national response to contain the dangerous rabies variant below. We are all very grateful for your support!

Meeting Stanley the Kitten

On a Friday morning, a 4-5 week old feral kitten showed up in a midtown Omaha driveway looking hungry and forlorn. Our friends brought him inside for feeding and TLC, and named him Stanley. The kitten was taken to a vet clinic and prescribed liquid, oral medication for what looked to be a spot of ringworm. The group of friends came together over the next two days to greet the furry friend, and to share toys and fostering advice.

From Bad to Worse

Over the weekend, Stanley grew progressively more agitated after taking his twice-a-day medicine. It seemed like a bad reaction, and something was wrong. After Sunday night’s feeding and medication dose, the kitten began to spasm, flail his legs, and lash out in high-energy bursts of anger. He went into a seizure-like state and stopped breathing, until his foster dad did chest compressions to revive him. This devastating turn and the abnormal kitten behavior prompted another urgent visit to the vet, where he was monitored all day on Monday and Tuesday, when he later passed away. The vet had wanted to watch and treat for a laundry list of potential causes, including a reaction to the medication, toxoplasmosis, parasites, or a neurological disorder, and more. The last – and most unlikely – cause on the list was rabies.

Fast Action Prompts National Public Health Response

After Stanley died, proactive testing of the kitten’s body proved that he did, in fact, have rabies. And there was more: the particular strain of the virus was something officials had never detected outside of the southeastern U.S. prior to this.

“The cat was sent to a lab in Lincoln and tested positive for rabies. But it was unlike anything Dr. Dustin Loy [of the Nebraska Veterinary Diagnostic Center] had ever seen. ‘We were quite surprised to find that this strain was a raccoon variant which had not been detected in a sustained manner west of the Appalachian Mountain range in the United States ever, and so this kind of raised a lot of alarms,’ Loy said.” (KETV, Nov. 30 2023)

Local and national experts from the Douglas County Health Department, UDSA and the CDC immediately coordinated an effort to trap and vaccinate wildlife in Douglas County in order to prevent a dangerous outbreak in Omaha’s dense raccoon population.

“The estimate is that if this variant becomes established, it results in six times the number of human exposures we currently see. There also is no natural boundary to prevent it from spreading to other states in the region.” - Phil Rooney, Douglas County Health Department (Nebraska Examiner Nov. 1, 2023)

“The CDC estimates that the virus would expand [and] over five years… make its way to South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri and Kansas, putting an estimated 7 million residents at increased risk.” - Ryan Wallace, head of the rabies epidemiology team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (The Washington Post, Nov. 26, 2023).

No one could have seen this coming. Thankfully, all of the friends and vets who cared for Stanley are healthy after treatments, and the rabies surveillance efforts in Douglas County continue with no red flags to date. We are grateful for this positive outcome, and appreciate your financial support for the kitten’s caretakers who were impacted. If you’re not able to donate at this time, please consider sharing this page.