Some Consequences of Proximity to a Disease Threat

Within the last few years much thought and empirical study have been directed to the understanding of behavior in situations where people are faced with the possibility that some valued objects (including life itself) may be destroyed or damaged.2 Situations of this type are aptly called threat situations. The seriousness of the loss anticipated may generally be regarded as depending on the values of the objects threatened. For example, floods are more likely to destroy property than human life, but epidemic diseases threaten life rather than property. Still finer distinctions are apparent in that children are peculiarly susceptible to some diseases and adults only slightly so, while for other diseases the reverse is true. The likelihood of loss, in any degree, depends on the circumstances in which the threat is presented: whether adequate means of escape or defense are available, the length of the warning period, the degree of proximity of the threat, and its mobility. During March of 1952 an opportunity was presented to study the effects of proximity to a mobile threat. An outbreak of rabies occurred among wild foxes in a large but well circumscribed area of Eastern Pennsylvania. This paper discusses the results of 300 interviews conducted among residents of Pennsylvania whose homes were at various distances from the focus of the outbreak. Before data collection began, the rabies situation was extensively reported in newspapers and on radio and television; foxes were trapped or shot on the streets of cities; several children had been bitten; a woman had died after being bitten on the finger by a rabid fox; dog quarantines were established; foxes were being systematically destroyed by groups of private hunters and also by a State-sponsored poisoning campaign directed by two professional coyote poisoners summoned from the far West for that purpose; and informative discussions of the history, etiology, symptoms, and treatment of rabies were presented in the press. As will be shown in the sequel, the greater the proximity to the threat: