3 ms·
To be fair bats are pretty harmless when they aren’t infected with rabies.
by codezero 8y ago
To be fair bats are pretty harmless when they aren’t infected with rabies.
- mirceal 8y agoTo be fair, in quite a few places bats are the main rabies infection vector.
- codezero 8y agoVery good point :)
- opencl 8y agoThe places where bats are the main rabies infection vector are generally places where rabies is extremely rare[1], such as the US with 1-2 cases per year. ~99% of human rabies cases globally are from dogs[2], unsurprisingly these are mostly in places where dogs are not usually vaccinated. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/bats/education/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/bats/education/index.html [2] http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/rabies http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/rabies
- mirceal 8y agoYes and when a bat has a 10% chance of carrying rabies you get a rabies shot it you come into contact with one. Yes, the odds of you getting it are small, but the downside is that if you do get it you’re almost guaranteed to die.
- opencl 8y agoThe number is probably way below 10%, but yes obviously getting the shot is still a very good idea. Though the other nasty thing is that getting rabies shots cost thousands or in some cases tens of thousands of dollars in the US, which leaves a lot of people with the choice between bankruptcy or some unknown probability of getting rabies and the subsequent guaranteed death.
- mirceal 8y agoWA state for example: between 3-10% of bats submitted for testing are found to be rabid (this is from the DOH website). Yes, 10% is the high number in some years.
- tomjakubowski 8y agoBats that have been submitted for testing are not likely representative of the overall bat population.
- baddox 8y agoBats that have been submitted for testing are likely fairly representative of the bat population that is likely to bite you.
- evandev 8y agoThe issue with getting a rabies shot if you come into contact with them is that in the USA, it can cost $3,000 easily ($1634 to $8415)[0]. Which when you assume most people live in a household, can be quite expensive. And if you look at the exposure to bats vs. human infected rate of rabies, it is so exceedingly rare.[1] [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5525325/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5525325/ [1]: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/48/11/1493/347031 https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/48/11/1493/347031
- lbriner 8y agoThe article seems to suggest that the victim wasn't suspicious because he wasn't knowingly bitten or scratched and could have either simply not noticed or caught it via a saliva path.
- evandev 8y agoUSA is one of those locations, but bats have approximately 0.5% infected rate estimated. 6% measured, but when you take into account that most of the tested bats were sickly, injured, easily captured, etc. Overall, it is very hard to measure, so it is pretty safe to assume around 0.5%[0] [0]: https://batworld.org/rabies-info/ https://batworld.org/rabies-info/
- classichasclass 8y agoWe have enough bat rabies in our community that our recommendation would be vaccination even with just trivial contact. It's our #1 reservoir.