AUGUSTA – A meeting among livestock and wildlife officials in Maine, other New England states, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick will be held this summer to discuss the airdropping of oral vaccine bait to eradicate raccoon rabies.

Officials are divided, however, on whether such a baiting program is cost-effective or necessary.

By airdropping matchbox-size pellets of fish meal containing rabies vaccine, Canada and France have eradicated red fox rabies. Texas did the same and eliminated coyote rabies.

Dr. Donald H. Lein, director of the diagnostic laboratory at Cornell University, said that this year an air-baiting program would start in the Connecticut River valley and in New Brunswick. “What began as a research project is now a control project,” he said. Lein is an advocate of the baiting program and recently traveled to Maine to discuss oral vaccines with top Maine agriculture officials.

Since the raccoon strain of rabies has been contained on the eastern seaboard, Lein said the goal is to keep it contained and eradicate it with intensive baiting programs.

Henry Hilton, head wildlife manager of Maine’s Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Department, disputed Lein’s claims that the July meeting will begin a baiting program. “Absolutely not,” Hilton said Friday. “It is nothing we have even considered.”

In 1999, the federal government funded baiting at $1.5 million. By 2001, that had increased to $7.7 million and the U.S. Department of Agriculture is asking for $16.2 million for 2002. “It has been approved in the House [of Representatives] and is headed for the Senate,” said Lein.

Lein said a raccoon-baiting program would be a prototype for similar vaccination programs elsewhere. “We have [tuberculosis] in deer in Michigan, brucellosis in bison in Yellowstone Park and pseudo-rabies in feral swine.”

Lein said he is working with all the New England states to put together a regional program. “Even baiting just once can help reduce these diseases,” he said.

The bait, which is harmless to humans and pets, vaccinates the raccoon that ingests it, so if it is bitten by a rabid raccoon, it will not become ill. The rabid raccoons eventually die out and with them, the disease. Each bait packet costs about $1.50, Lein said, although a cheaper bait, called sachet bait, is in development. The sachet bait, which is not surrounded by the hard fish meal pellet, would have the bonus effect of working on skunks, young raccoons and feral cats.

For any such bait program to succeed, said Lein, the three agencies that would be involved – Maine’s departments of Agriculture, Human Services and Inland Fisheries and Wildlife – must be committed.

Kathleen Gensheimer, Maine’s epidemiologist with the DHS, was attending a conference in Portland, Ore., this week and was not aware of the impending meeting.

“We’ve discussed this many times in the past but we have not gotten together to update ourselves in the past year and a half. Such a meeting would be quite appropriate,” she said.

Gensheimer would not commit to whether DHS would be in favor or against the baiting program, but said “it behooves all of us to remain updated and well informed so we are in the best position to make decisions.”

She said the issue is complex and there are still many questions remaining, including the scope of the plan, funding, maintenance of any plan, manpower issues and final evaluation of any bait program.

“Certainly without funding support,” she said, “Maine wouldn’t be in the position to participate.”

Hilton, however, was adamant that such a baiting program is unnecessary. “The idea of oral bait vaccines has been advanced for some time now,” he said.

Five years ago, New Brunswick officials pressed the state of Maine to begin a program to help eradicate raccoon rabies before it reached their province. Today, it is rampant across the border from Calais.

Hilton said that only two people in the country contract rabies annually. “We do not want to take this disease for granted and will continue our public education campaigns. However, there is no cost-justified reason, other than a feel-good reason, to activate a baiting program. If people were dying, if people were sick, or affected, that would be something else entirely.”

Hilton acknowledged that not utilizing such a program “is a difficult thing, public relations-wise. If I thought we were saving lives and eradicating rabies, it would be wonderful. But it just doesn’t do that.”

“Unless something changes between now and July, there will be no baiting program,” he said. Hilton did say that a priority in discussions at the July meeting will be upgrading surveillance of Maine’s wildlife and working with U.S. Department of Agriculture leaders regarding funding to help monitor other diseases, such as foot and mouth disease and West Nile virus.