Sorry if this has been asked before, I’m sure the Dope has seen multiple threads of this:
I got bitten by a dog less than 2 hours ago.
It’s past midnight here.
The owners claim the dog was vaccinated for rabies and whatnot, but I am a bit dubious of that claim.
Suppose the dog wasn’t vaccinated - if I get vaccinated for rabies and tetanus within 24 hours of the bite, is that still effective? 48 hours?
Do urgent-care clinics usually carry such vaccines for humans readily available?
Go to the Emergency Room. Pronto.
Rabies is no joke.
Once symptoms show, people almost always die, barring rare circumstances or experimental treatment. However, it travels along the nerves, and takes a few months to reach the brain. Treatment in that time will be fine. That said, get it treated ASAP just in case.
Worth repeating.
Rabies is 100 percent survivable if treated promptly.
Rabies shots are not 100 percent effective if you delay treatment, so do not delay treatment. Generally, the survival rate is still very high as long as you begin treatment within a week. It’s not something to mess around with, though. Get thee to thy nearest ER, pronto.
Once you get symptoms, you’re screwed. There’s a relatively new (within the past decade or so) treatment called the Milwaukee Protocol where they put you into an induced coma and pump you full of anti-viral drugs and drugs to suppress your brain function to prevent brain damage. The survival rate for the Milwaukee Protocol is somewhere around 12 percent. Before the Milwaukee Protocol, the survival rate was about 0 percent, so while 12 percent isn’t great, it’s a lot better than what it used to be.
Most urgent care centers have rabies shots in stock. They will also treat uninsured patients, and vaccine companies often have programs in place to give free vaccines to uninsured patients who qualify for assistance. There’s no reason not to seek treatment.
Update: I went to the ER and was told that the rabies vaccine is expensive and scarce, and therefore not given out unless there has been a really thorough examination by a doctor and that the doctor decides that the vaccine is truly necessary. I’m back home, no treatment was given…I might see an urgent-care clinic to see if the doctor feels it really is needed. Given that the owners claimed that the dog was vaccinated, and Animal Control might examine the dog, I suspect it won’t be needed.
I will ask again. I was told, however, that at least in the Austin, TX area, that only major hospitals have them, and even then only a couple of such hospitals do.
Hopefully they don’t cost $3,000 like the Internet rumors.
Right, I won’t mess around. But on an academic level I am curious - is the rabies vaccine something that loses, say, 0.1% effectiveness with every hour that goes by after the dog bite, so that a vaccine administered 100 hours after the bite is 10% less effective than one administered immediately?
Can the owners provide proof that their dog was vaccinated? Generally, the vet will give the owners a certificate of vaccination with the date and the type of vaccine administered. If their dog was vaccinated, they should be able to provide proof.
Rabies is a very serious illness, but the truth is that Rabies is extremely rare, especially in developed western countries. I’ve been bitten 3 times and scratched many many times by dogs in my life (scratches and 2 of the bites from playing, only once there was a truly aggressive territorial dog) and my girlfriend has worked a lot with dog asylums so she has come into contact with a lot of people with dog bites. Almost everybody just lets it heal naturally without going to the hospital. It is always a good idea to clean the wound or scrapes though. This is what I did a lot of the time.
Fortunately where I live, rabies vaccine is not in short supply, and the cost is modest, perhaps $20 or less. Twenty years ago I needed to run an early morning errand before my morning coffee and forgot to pronounce the ritual incantations necessary to keep the neighbor’s dogs in line … so one of the dogs bit me. (I think I still have the scar; I can’t remember whether it was Iy Yao or Iy San that bit me.) Everyone thought this was funny; the dogs’ owner laughed most of all. I learned a new word in Thai when I went to the clinic:
“Was it a good dog?”
– I don’t think so — it bit me after all!
I learned that when modifying ‘dog’ the Thai adjective for ‘good’ translates as ‘non-rabid.’
Just now, to double-check the vaccine price, I mentioned this thread to my wife and that a patient was denied the vaccine. Her response: Tell him to bring the dog and have it bite the doctor. :smack: 
Rabied dogs are sort of more crazy suicidal foaming at the mouth and desperate for a feed…
In what circumstance were you bitten ? The alpha dog protecting the pack ? Not rabied.
The rabied dog would be fighting the pack, not protecting it.
Its exceptionally unlikely for the dog bite to give you dog rabies, as the vaccine for dogs has wiped out the canine verson in the USA.
if you got bit by a bat, skunk , fox, mongoose or raccoon , then you have been bit by an animal that has a realistic chance of having the virus… especially if it came to bite you ! (rather than you invading its hiding spot.)
See
The people with dog rabies in the USA got it from outside the USA.
In the USA, even large wilderness states like texas only had 10 dogs detected with rabies in 2015. They didn’t have local variant of canine rabies - most had bat rabies. Only one had the canine rabies, but that dog had been imported with it !
BTW, In 2004 a 20 year old man died , and became an organ donor. 4 people who received organs from him contracted bat rabies… Turns out he had been bitten by a bat in the time before he died.
That doubled the number of rabies cases in the USA that year… 4 meant double the normal rate!
Not just the receipt (which I would demand to see) but every jurisdiction I can think of issues tags with the year on it. and they are usually on the collar.*
On the other hand, in my county the last case of dog-induced rabies was over fifty years ago.
On the gripping hand, the consequences are so heavy, you gotta make sure.
*Our hound don’t tolerate collars so we just have them handy to produce when we’re out and about with them.
When I got bit by a big random dog, the staff at the walk-in clinic were more worried about tetanus than rabies, especially since my tetanus shot was not up to date.
Right. Getting rabies from a dog bite in the USA is like a bad version of the lottery - highly unlikely, but the consequences of it happening are enormous.
I am going to the clinic now. If they don’t give a rabies shot, should I demand it, or would that demand even do any good? (Scarcity and cost again rearing its ugly head in the non-universal-health-care-USA)
You may need a tetanus shot if you’re not updated on one . Did you get the dog’s owner’s name etc?
Yes, this and our dog has a tag on his collar with the date he received the vaccination and our vet’s name. It should be easy for the owner to get verification from his vet.
It doesn’t work like this. The family of viruses that causes rabies (lyssavirus) enters the nervous system and penetrates the brain, rendering it essentially immune to post-exposure prophylaxis once it does so. You basically have the period of time for it to migrate before it can be treated, hence the necessity of prompt treatment.
If the owner does not have innoculation information on hand his or her veterinarian will have it available. Animal Control can encourage this by taking possession of the dog until and unless the owner can provide evidence of innoculation. Tetanus and other bacteriological infections are more likely, but while canine rabies has been widely controlled in the US, dogs can receive and transfer it from other non-symptomatic carriers. As engineer_comp_geek notes, the only post-infection treatment method has poor efficacy and the progression of the disease is nothing short of horrifying for both the patient and observers.
The owner of the animal is, of course, liable for costs and damages.
Stranger
If it has time to travel along the nerves but you get treatment before it gets to the brain, how does it affect the parts it’s had time to travel along?
Yeah I have their contact info. But the owner is at work and can’t retrieve the vaccine info for the dog until later today or tonight.
I got a tetanus booster in 2009 but am probably near the tail end of it, and maybe overdue for a booster anyway.