RHDV2

There is a pandemic happening, and it’s not Covid 19. It’s something that I am very worried about. And this virus infects rabbits, not humans. Yes, the virus I am talking about is the rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV2). This virus has become a disaster for rabbits, and it’s a catastrophe. This virus has spread like crazy. Through the continuous process of infected rabbits meeting with uninfected rabbits, the virus has been able to thrive and, in this way, it can never run out of hosts. Hundreds of rabbits in the wild are dying but we still are not focusing on eradicating this horrible disease.

 We do have a vaccine but we have 2 problems, one is the supply. There is a limited supply of vaccines because not enough people care about bunnies and they are still viewed as food. So that’s the first problem, people don’t give a damn about bunnies. The second thing is location, when a rabbit has RHDV2 you need to move fast, like really fast. Otherwise, the bunny could die. And it gets harder if you are trying to do it with a wild rabbit. Wild rabbits are very skittish and they’re prey animals. So, if you’re trying to catch an infected rabbit and vaccinate it, just catching it will take a lot of effort and time. Plus, rabbits are extremely good at hiding their illness and their masters of camouflage, they stick around places with a ton of hiding spaces. So just getting a good look at them to observe them for example their eating habits, how they behave, basically anything that shows that they’re infected. And in RHDV2 cases it’s really hard to notice any sympytoms, in most cases the rabbit unfortunately just drops dead. It’s so sad.

 And it’s also hard for domestic bunnies, in some cases bunny owners don’t even want to get their bunnies vaccinated. That’s the worst-case scenario because they don’t think the money is worth saving a life. We’ll have to make the vaccine cheap so that everybody can access it. We need to fix these issues and we need to do it fast and efficiently.

This disease has been hard to fight against but we in our history have defeated many viruses and brought their populations to extremely low levels. I believe if we continue taking the eradication of this virus seriously by creating the vaccine and funding the fight, I believe one day we will have a  free RHDV2 world.