Raccoons

They look like small brown bricks. They smell like fish. And they just might be the answer to reducing Anne Arundel County's rabid raccoon population.For the second consecutive year, the county's Department of Health will dispense Raboral V-RG, an oral rabies vaccine, throughout the Annapolis peninsula, which stretches from Crownsville, through Annapolis, to the Bay Bridge. Health department officials and volunteers plan to distribute 9,000 doses of the vaccine, which are embedded in fish meal, on Monday.

They look like small brown bricks. They smell like fish. And they just might be the answer to reducing Anne Arundel County's rabid raccoon population.For the second consecutive year, the county's Department of Health will dispense Raboral V-RG, an oral rabies vaccine, throughout the Annapolis peninsula, which stretches from Crownsville, through Annapolis, to the Bay Bridge. Health department officials and volunteers plan to distribute 9,000 doses of the vaccine, which are embedded in fish meal, on Monday.

In a rare outbreak of rabies in the city, health officials confirmed yesterday at least two recent cases involving infected raccoons, and residents reported a third rabid raccoon in Northeast Baltimore.Dr. Peter Beilenson, city health commissioner, said last night that one of the cases involved a man who raised a raccoon. No other details were immediately available. Reached at home, Jerome Ferguson, chief of the city's division for environmental health, would not comment.Records from the Municipal Animal Shelter show that a rabid raccoon was found March 12 in a residential back yard in tTC Lauraville, behind Morgan State University in Northeast Baltimore.

Anne Arundel County Health Department officials are counting on a fishy-smelling bait laced with rabies vaccine to help slow the spread of the disease among raccoons.The vaccine, disguised in a reeking raccoon delicacy, will be scattered through wooded and bushy areas on the Annapolis peninsula in October in a test that, if successful in reducing rabies cases -- and the resultant threat to people -- could be expanded to other areas.Last year, Anne Arundel County had the most animal rabies cases of any county in Maryland, with 97 animals, mostly raccoons, found to be infected.

Anne Arundel County Health Department officials are counting on a fishy-smelling bait laced with rabies vaccine to help slow the spread of the disease among raccoons.The vaccine disguised in a reeking raccoon delicacy will be scattered through wooded and bushy areas on the Annapolis peninsula in October in a test that, if successful in reducing rabies cases -- and the resultant threat to people -- could be expanded to other parts of the county.Most casesLast year, Anne Arundel County had the most animal rabies cases of any county in Maryland, with 97 animals, mostly raccoons, found to be infected.

Good news for humankind: We're not entirely to blame for Chesapeake Bay pollution. So says Virginia Tech biologist George M. Simmons, a former Antarctic explorer who now roams the tidal creeks of his state's Eastern Shore armed with a pooper scooper.Simmons' surprising conclusion: Humans aren't always the source of the fecal coliform bacteria that contaminates some bay waters, forcing Maryland and Virginia officials to close thousands of acres of clam and oyster beds each year. Neither are geese and ducks, which often get blamed for fouling creeks and ponds.

DON'T name them the Crows, Buzzards, Rockfish, Old Bays, Middies, Raccoons, Ponies, Bawlamorons, Bangles, A-rabbers, Sea Nettles, Sons of the Colts, Readers or even the Marble Steps.The world is a safer place. Taiwan recognizes China.The city that reads has no need for libraries.And the Oscar for long-distance running to Bob Dole!Pub Date: 3/27/96

It's a situation that pits a wild-animal lover against the state agency designed to protect such animals, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR).Howard County animal activist Colleen Layton says she has saved more than 100 hurt or sick animals over the past 18 years. But the DNR says her efforts are illegal, and it has moved to stop her from taking in more wild animals.DNR officials seized four skunks and two raccoons from Ms. Layton's 5-acre farm on Route 99 in Woodstock in the past month, saying she violated state law by breeding the raccoons and caring for the skunks.

* The presence of rats, raccoons and other varmints may make you reappraise your feed choices. Raccoons, for instance, love suet.* After it snows, sprinkle some seed on the ground so the birds can get to it. A flurry of bird activity around the feeder can be a sign of coming snow.* Try to put some water out and keep the ice broken in sub-freezing weather. The birds need water just as much as they need food.* Put animal hair, yarn, straw, loose wool near feeders for birds to use for nest-building this spring.

I vaguely remember sitting at his kitchen table in Mahwah, New Jersey, telling my brother Tom how much I hated cats. But here was my brother telling me that his future second wife was a cat lover. I prefer dogs, I said. She's beautiful, he said.The one dog in his life had been a mistake, the result of a father's yearning to capture on film the delights of a daughter's face presed against the window at the mall pet store.Long before the dog was buried in a one-gallon Baggie under a back-yard gravestone, Elizabeth had wisely shifted her emotional allegiance to Snoopy -- ageless, immortal and stuffed.

Forum on county reaction to H1N1 virus A public forum on the H1N1 virus sponsored by the Anne Arundel County Department of Health will be held 7 p.m. Sept. 14 at Anne Arundel Community College, Cade Building, Room 219. County Executive John R. Leopold will host the forum to update residents about the county's response to the virus. Department of Health and public schools officials will provide information. To register, e-mail CCServices@aacounty.org. Free FluMist vaccine will be offered to all Anne Arundel County Public School students through a partnership with the Anne Arundel County Department of Health Oct. 5 through Oct. 15. Administered to healthy children between the ages of 5 and 11, the nasal spray vaccine contains the live, but attenuated (weakened)

Lead certificate requirement The Anne Arundel County Department of Health reminds parents that all children newly enrolled in county pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and first grade are required to have a lead testing certificate. The certificate ensures that children living in high-risk areas are being tested for lead poisoning, which can cause young children to have difficulty learning, behavioral problems and developmental disabilities. High-risk ZIP codes in Anne Arundel are 20711, 20714, 20764, 20779, 21060, 21061, 21225, 21226, and 21402, because they have a greater proportion of older homes that may contain lead paint.

Chabad to welcome new Torah scroll In time for the Jewish New Year, Chabad of Anne Arundel County will welcome a new Torah scroll today. The Torah scroll, one of the most sacred objects in Judaism, has roughly 600,000 handwritten letters. With a quill and special mix for ink, a scribe writes the five books of Moses on roughly 54 pieces of parchment, a process that usually takes more than a year. When a scroll is completed, it calls for great celebration in the city where the Torah will reside in its new home, the Holy Ark in the synagogue.

If you come across a brown cube on the ground -- it'll be about the size of an engagement ring box -- leave it be. It is probably a vaccine for the county's raccoons. The Anne Arundel County Health Department distributed more than 81,000 vaccination-laced pellets throughout the Broadneck Peninsula this week. Each cube smells of fish and has the Health Department's phone number stamped on the side. "Rabies is a public health threat," said Elin Jones, a Health Department spokeswoman. "It is a fatal viral infection.

CARPENTER ANTS have munched through the brick (or mortar) of our solarium and now are bustling en masse around it. Chipmunks lounge in our bird feeder and deer have plundered my garden. It is a summer when, more than usual, the varmints are repeatedly attacking, and winning. Inexplicably, the rabbits, which are plentiful and some nearly as big as cocker spaniels, have almost left the garden alone, so far. I live less than 100 yards north of Baltimore City, yet deer have chomped my day lillies, Plantagenet hostas (the fragrant white ones)

NEW YORK -- The diamondback terrapin dug herself a hole in the middle of a sandy trail at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge along the south shore of Queens and went right to work, apparently oblivious to the biologist crouching 20 feet away and trying not to breathe. In just a few minutes, she laid a dozen inchlong eggs in the hole, filled it in, danced her wide-webbed back feet on the sand to tamp it flat and ambled back toward the water. Before the turtle, a sturdy specimen with black spots on her face and a barnacle on her back, could get far, the biologist, Professor Russell L. Burke of Hofstra University, scooped her up and set her in a bucket with two others.

Anne Arundel County health officials issued a call for help yesterday in locating a young man who was exposed to rabies through some baby raccoons that he and two friends found late last month in eastern Baltimore County. Clinton Mallory, believed to be in his late teens, has been sought since Tuesday, when health officials learned that the animals had tested positive for the fatal disease. He had been living in the Brooklyn Park area, but friends and relatives have not seen him lately, said Carole Kauffman, a nurse who works for the county Health Department.

There's nothing like taking your family on a camping trip -- getting away from civilization, sleeping under the open sky, looking up into the heavens and gazing upon an awe-inspiring vista of millions and millions of ... what are those things? Bats? Very large mosquitoes? Oh NO! They've taken little Ashley! So perhaps it's better not to sleep under the open sky. But you should still go camping, because it's the best way to get close to nature, with "nature" defined as "anything you would kill if it got in your house."

They look like small brown bricks. They smell like fish. And they just might be the answer to reducing Anne Arundel County's rabid raccoon population.For the second consecutive year, the county's Department of Health will dispense Raboral V-RG, an oral rabies vaccine, throughout the Annapolis peninsula, which stretches from Crownsville, through Annapolis, to the Bay Bridge. Health department officials and volunteers plan to distribute 9,000 doses of the vaccine, which are embedded in fish meal, on Monday.

They look like small brown bricks. They smell like fish. And they just might be the answer to reducing Anne Arundel County's rabid raccoon population.For the second consecutive year, the county's Department of Health will dispense Raboral V-RG, an oral rabies vaccine, throughout the Annapolis peninsula, which stretches from Crownsville, through Annapolis, to the Bay Bridge. Health department officials and volunteers plan to distribute 9,000 doses of the vaccine, which are embedded in fish meal, on Monday.