With a heavy heart we are releasing this urgent and important statement.
Over the past few days, the five rabbits living at Ippoasi have all died completely unexpected due to a new strain of the RHD (Rabbit haemorrhagic disease), the RHDV2.
As already communicated, we found Salvia dead in the morning a few days ago after she didn’t show any sign of discomfort. We decided to get an autopsy done to understand what happened. Before we even received the results, Rosmarino had left us as well. We immediately took the remaining three to the clinic to have them hospitalised.
We were told that it was quite likely that Salvia and Rosmarino had contracted a new strain of the Rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV2): a strain of the virus coming from France. Until a few months ago the vaccine wasn’t available yet in Italy. The virus has no diagnosis nor cure. The vets informed us that the virus has been going around in the recent months.
Timo and Basilico both died in the early hours of Monday. Menta sadly also left us just this morning…
We are very grateful to the vet clinic in Cascina where the rabbits were taken in on Sunday afternoon and everything possible was done. Thank you for helping us and for giving us answers.
Obviously our fear was that we had done something wrong but the vets reassured us that it wasn’t our fault. Literally a couple of hours ago we received confirmation from the lab that conducted the autopsy. RHDV2 does not infect other species, only rabbits.
RHDV2 is a new and highly contagious strain of the virus. Remember that at this point there is no cure but there is a vaccine which is available in Italy. The rabbits who lived at Ippoasi were all sterilised and vaccinated for RHDV1. We are hoping to inform as many people as possible with this communique. If we had known of the existence of this strain, we would have done anything to avoid this tragedy.
Contact your veterinarians and get your rabbits vaccinated. Do not underestimate this risk.
We are all destroyed. It was all too fast. Unfortunately we had not been informed by anyone of this epidemic. With days, the virus took all five rabbits. Just Sunday we enlarged their house…
Goodbye dear friends, our hearts are broken.
The volunteers of Ippoasi
