Yes, that’s an "oops," but it’s also not completely preventable.

A stray dog and her 6 puppies were sent to a foster home recently by a South Boston, VA animal shelter. It’s a common and logical thing to do, to get the puppies into a lower risk environment until they are old enough to be adopted. However, any animal with an unknown history is a risk, and that was a problem here, because the dog started to act abnormally after being fostered. She was subsequently diagnosed with rabies, and seven people (including, not surprisingly, the foster family) had to receive post-exposure prophylaxis.

Here are some comments from the article:

It takes about 10 days for an animal to start showing signs of rabies. Staff at the pound had no clue that the dog had rabies because it only stayed there for two hours.

The first point is incorrect. It can take much longer for an animal to develop signs of rabies. The 10 day window is what is used after an animal has bitten a person, because an animal that is shedding the virus will become ill with rabies within 10 days. However, the incubation time (i.e. the time from when an animal is exposed to the time it develops disease) can be months. So, a 10 day quarantine of new arrivals is good for some things, but doesn’t mean that the dog won’t develop signs of rabies later.

Staff sanitized the area.

This isn’t really needed for rabies, because the rabies virus isn’t spread through contact with the general environment. It is certainly a good practice for the shelter overall, though, since there are presumably many other bacteria and viruses lurking in the shelter environment.

When an animal is brought in now, it’s monitored for signs of any disease.

That’s a common (and common sense) measure. However, it only helps with some, but not all, diseases. In this particular case, it may have helped the staff to identify this dog as being rabid before it was sent to a foster home (because it developed signs in less than two day), but it won’t prevent all cases like this from occurring. It’s a tough balance between monitoring for signs of disease and wanting to get the animal out of the shelter ASAP (because of shelter space issues, and to reduce the chance of the animal being exposed to something in the shelter, etc.). There’s no perfect approach.

“People need to get their dogs and cats vaccinated. You’re playing Russian Roulette when you turn the cat out at night and it doesn’t have the vaccine,” said Dan Richardson, the Environmental Health Manager for Southern Virginia.

Amen to that.