Are foxes killing hunters? 2

Hunters' multilingual internet portal Yeswehunt.eu has published a quite scary article on a disease that affects foxes and dogs and might be lethal to humans.

We are winning the battle against rabies in Europe but fears are growing that foxes are spreading a new disease that is fatal to humans. The problem has now reached as far as Sweden and hunters and anyone else coming into contact with infected foxes won’t even know that they are diseased until 10-15 years later, by which time their internal organs are so damaged that up to 90% of patients die.

The disease is called Aveolar echinococcosis in humans and is caused by an infection with the larval stage of Echinococcus multilocularis, an exotic tapeworm found principally in foxes and dogs. People get infected by accidentally eating eggs that have passed out in the faeces of infected foxes and dogs. That could be through accidental direct contact with faeces or, for example, by eating contaminated mushrooms or berries.

The disease in humans can take between 10 and 15 years to be diagnosed, by which time it has caused so much damage to the liver that up to 90% of patients die.

Nowhere in Europe is safe from the tapeworm unless you live in Norway, Finland, United Kingdom, Ireland or Malta, where the tapeworm has yet to reach. However, that might not last long. Sweden lost its tapeworm free status in December 2010 when a fox that was shot there was found to be infected.

You haven’t heard about this tapeworm or the disease it causes before because the mainstream media has not yet grasped the scale of the problem that Europe may face. However, scientists are very worried about the growing threat to human health and even held a conference on the issue in 2010, although nothing was reported in the media about it.

Trials have already begun in France and Germany on the use of treated baits in urban areas to reduce infection rates in the fox population, in an attempt to reduce the risk of foxes transmitting the tapeworm to humans. Hunters have been helping with some of these studies by shooting foxes to measure the effectiveness of the treatments. To be effective thousands of baits need to be dropped by air and by hand on a monthly basis. One cost estimate was put at €2.50 euros per person per year in urban areas for an effective fox worming programme and that was thought reasonable against the annual cost of having to treat and hospitalise infected and terminally-ill people.

There is a growing urban population of foxes in Europe. Wildlife programmes and protectionists have presented the fox as a harmless pet to be welcomed into people’s gardens. Perhaps when the realisation grows that infected foxes could be killing families in their own garden some respect may return for the risks that wild animals pose.

 Hunters know those risks well. So perhaps foxes are not killing that many hunters after all and as responsible members of our local communities we should consider our educating our non-hunting family members, friends and acquaintances about the risks of close contact with foxes.

For more information check Yeswehunt.eu!

Photo: Rūdis Naglis