Second cat with rabies turns up in western Lancaster County.

A Mount Joy woman must undergo a series of rabies shots after letting a feral cat into her home last week.It’s the second rabid cat, as well as a rabid raccoon, found in western Lancaster County in as many weeks. “I’m not sure if this isn’t the tip of an iceberg,” Connie Kondravy, director of the Organization for the Responsible Care of Animals, said Tuesday. Kondravy said the Mount Joy woman called ORCA on Sept. 1 to report a stray cat outside her home on Charlan Avenue, on the western side of the borough. Kondravy said she told the woman to trap the cat under a box and not touch the animal until it had been examined. Instead, Kondravy said, the woman “let it in her house. She didn’t want to put a box over it because she thought (the precautions) were silly.” Kondravy said the woman told her the cat was acting “bizarre.” Once inside, she said, it ran around the house and, eventually, bit her.The woman called Mount Joy Borough police, Kondravy said, and the officer who responded shot the cat. An ORCA worker retrieved the cat’s body from under a porch, where it had fled after being shot, and sent the carcass to Harrisburg for testing. The test came back positive for rabies on Tuesday. Mount Joy police on Tuesday issued a rabies warning for the area. The infected cat, according to police, was a gray domestic shorthair with a white underbelly.Last week, ORCA reported that one of its employees was getting rabies shots after being exposed to a cat on Buttonwood Drive in Elizabethtown. That cat had a bloody wound on its side, likely from an attack by a rabid animal such as a raccoon, fox or, possibly, another feral cat. Kondravy said she isn’t aware of any wounds on the cat found in Mount Joy. In April, the state Department of Agriculture said it found nine rabid animals — five raccoons, a fox, a bat and two cats — in the mid-state area, including four in Lancaster County. “It seems like this is a bigger situation,” Kondravy said. “It’s so scary because we have more and more feral cats, and no one knows what to do about it.”One problem, she said, is that “you can’t necessarily look at an animal and say it’s rabid.” The stereotypical symptom — foaming at the mouth — could be indicative of several ailments other than rabies, she said. At the same time, not all symptoms of rabies are immediately visible to a casual onlooker. Dr. David Wolfgang, state veterinarian with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, said incidents of rabies this year in Pennsylvania are “about average so far.” However, he noted that rabies can pop up in pockets around the state. A raccoon tested positive for rabies in western Lancaster County on Aug. 30, he noted. Infected animals in the wild, such as raccoons and skunks, can easily transmit the disease to domestic animals and livestock if they come in contact with each other, Wolfgang said. “Unfortunately, feral cats tend to hang out in the same areas that raccoons do,” he said. “Plus, you have people who think that feral cats need to be fed, and that brings them closer to houses.”Feral cats “tend to be the species that brings rabies in contact with people,” Wolfgang added. If you come into contact with a raccoon that wants to bite you, people will retreat,” he said. “But people will find a stray cat that is sick and they will pick it up and try to help it ... and inadvertently expose themselves.” People absolutely should not handle stray cats that appear sick, he stressed. Instead, he said, contact the police or a local animal rescue group. “And, as much as they can, dogs and cats need to be vaccinated for rabies,” Wolfgang said.continue