Bat encounter and rabies risk

There have been cases where people have been successfully treated for rabies and survived. The treatment has a survival rate of less than 10% and can also cause irreversible brain damage. Check out the Milwaukee protocol.

Well if you’re in Africa, I think you’re pretty much fucked no matter what happens.

In general, an infected animal will bite other animals before dying. Yes, it always kills the host, but it’s been spread long before the host dies.

What a number of great-sounding answers! Viruses are fuckin’ crazy :eek:

To the OP, take your daughter to the doctor and have bloodwork for rabies titers. When you see that they are high enough from her other shots, it might help you to stop worrying.

I read somewhere that bats have a virus that make them seem to be rabid, but they are actually dieing from something that won’t cross over to humans. I’ll look for it tomorrow.

A bat doing normal bat things probably doesn’t have rabies. If this had happened to me under the circumstances you described, I would not worry at all. If it had happened during the day and blood or other exchanges of body fluids happened I would just take myself off to the doctor and let them tell me what needed to happen.

I know. However, when dealing with obsessive fear, I figured listing every extremely remotely unlikely possibility was likely to be less than helpful.

Don’t do this OP. Titers don’t tell you if you need PEP, and it would just be a waste of time and money to do this. Since she had a full course of PEP less than 10 years ago, you have no good reason to think her titers are inadequate. But most imporantly, it highly improbable that she was exposed to the virus.

Bats and other animals can shed the virus days before showing clinical signs of illness. Since lay people are not expert enough in bat behavior to say what is “normal bat things”, it’s best if they treat any bat contact in which a scratch or bite can’t be ruled out as a possible rabies exposure, regardless of how the bat the acting.

Case in point, in 2009 a guy in Missouri was playing with a bat he’d found in his home. The bat bit him on his ear, but the guy thought nothing of it because the bat didn’t appear abnormal, even after keeping an eye on it for 3 days afterwards. So he didn’t seek medical care.

A month later, dude died from rabies.

I agree that the OP should follow the advice of her daughter’s physician and the county health department.

The last issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association had a story about a sugarcane field worker in Louisiana (newly arrived from Mexico) who became sick with generalized symptoms and shoulder/upper extremity weakness and numbness. He wound up being hospitalized with what was first thought to be a variant of Guillain-Barre syndrome. Later, after his condition had deteriorated they tested him for rabies, with positive results.

“Public health authorities in Louisiana and Mexico interviewed the patient’s family members, friends, and coworkers to identify potential rabies virus exposures. The patient’s mother stated that the patient was bitten by a vampire bat on the heel of his left foot while he was sleeping. The bite occurred on July 15 in his home state of Michoacán, Mexico, 10 days before his departure for the United States. He did not seek medical attention for this bite and had no history of vaccination against rabies. No other exposures to bats, dogs, or other mammals were identified.”

The article contains cheery thoughts about possible spread of vampire bats northward due to climate change.

(obviously this is a very different situation from the one described in the OP).

Update.
Oregon sunshine-daughter remembered that she had a break in the skin on her hand the bat may have touched when it fluttered by. This was enough for the physician to order shots. She started today and will only have one more - thanks to being vaccinated previously it’s not as many shots.