The first thing I did, before posting this thread even, was read the Wikipedia articles on squirrels and on rabies, from which I learned that while they can carry rabies, they aren’t a known vector to humans. So I know I didn’t get anything from it.
Having said that, I still wish I knew what the HECK was wrong with it. I’m actually starting to remember that about a decade ago, there was a big deal with Mad Squirrel Disease–apparently a prion disease in squirrels that people in Kentucky were contracting by… um… eating squirrel brains.
I answered this upstream: “Dudes feed squirrels, thus squirrels lose their fear of humans.”
Around here the squirrels are so well fed they have become agressive in their earch fr people-food, and some attacks have occurred. It is a political issue- whether or not to trap and kill the squirrels.
That’s worth noting. Not infrequently, people who contract rabies can recall seeing bats or having bats in their chimney or attic or whatever, but don’t recall being bitten by a bat, or sometimes don’t think they ever even came into contact with a bat. And since rabies is 100% fatal once the symptoms show up, well, that’s pretty scary.
Not quite 100% fatal - there’ve been a handful of human survivors of clinical rabies, almost all of them having received anti-rabies prophylaxis before or after exposure.
Well … I was thinking of mentioning the six survivors, but I don’t think they really count. 5 of them had either been vaccinated beforehand or were vaccinated after (they’re described as having suffered from “vaccine failure”), and in any case 4 of the 5 suffered from pretty severe brain damage.
The recent (December 2004) case of Jeanna Giese in Wisconsin, the case you link to above, is quite extraordinary; she not only survived without any administration of the vaccine (apparently thanks to some antiviral drugs and an induced coma) but she came through it well enough to be back in school and keeping up with her classmates. Unfortunately, at least 6 similar efforts to save other rabies patients since then have failed.
So if somebody starts displaying symptoms of rabies, they are very nearly certainly going to die, it seems.
I’ve been monitoring rather than contributing, since the discussion is quite correct and my comments are superfluous. Except–
Bats (and raccoons and skunks) can be asymptomatic carriers of rabies. This means that they can carry and transmit the disease without becoming ill themselves. If they don’t become ill, they don’t die, and they aren’t removed from the population. Such is not the case with other mammals including squirrels.
Also, there are several instances in the literature of people contracting rabies from bats without a bite or a scratch. (Sorry, I don’t have time to search for a cite now. If it becomes an issue, I’ll do so or withdraw this statement.) As I recall, these are people who claimed to never have handled a bat, but merely to have “found one behind the curtains in the bedroom”. If such non-contact transmissions from bats do indeed occur, this amplifies the need for caution around them.
