Genetically engineered rabies vaccines, together with more traditional rabies vaccines, are now being aimed at rabies in northeastern Canada and the United States, where the disease has reached epidemic proportions among raccoons, according to Dr. Bruno Chomel, an epidemiologist at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. "Live, attenuated rabies vaccines have been used with wildlife in Europe for more than a decade and, more recently, the vaccinia recombinant rabies vaccine has been used," says Chomel, who recently completed a 10-year overview of rabies in California. He notes that use of rabies vaccines for wildlife immunization has been much more controversial and slower to come into use in the United States. Rabies continues to be a human health hazard in South and Central America, but also in the United States, as illustrated by the recent death of an elderly man in the San Francisco Bay Area after being bitten by a dog in Mexico and the July death of a young girl infected by a rabid bat in New York. In California, rabies among wildlife is persistent in bats and skunks, and vaccines have not yet been developed to control either of those forms of the disease.