Wife found dead bat in house -- rabies confirmed..

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Bats eat insects. The brown bat can eat up to 100 mosquitoes in an hour. The bat colony from Braken, TX is 30 million strong and eats around 250 tons of insects (including mosquitoes) every night. If it weren’t for bats munching on mosquitoes, there would be a lot more of us dying of mosquito-borne diseases like yellow fever and malaria.

We need bats to pollinate some crops. Bats make excellent parents, and some species even adopt orphan bats and feed injured colony-mates. A protein found in vampire bat saliva helps save stroke victims. Besides, how can you hate this little guy?

The thing is, bats and people really don’t cross paths unless something has gone wrong - like a bat is infected with rabies and is behaving in an atypical fashion. Yet, where other animals infected with rabies attack humans or are otherwise clearly deranged, the most a bat will do is flop around and try to escape. If a person handles the bat, they’re likely to be bitten and not even realize it. Bat bites are that wimpy. There is no treatment for rabies once there are symptoms and it is invariably fatal, which is why even if there’s no evidence of a bite, if a person has handled a bat, and the bat isn’t there to be killed and tested for rabies (yes, killed), that person is going to get vaccinated for rabies.

The little girl from your story wasn’t killed by a bat. She was killed by a virus and the ignorance of her parents and neighbors.

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Eh. Nothing kills humans – in the tens of millions – like other humans. How can anyone love them?

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I didn’t say she was killed by a bat. And the little girl in my grandmothers story if she had lived would be maybe 120 years old by now. The story caused me to read about rabies…and bats figured pretty heavily in my reading.

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In related news Mike Trout has found a dead bat in the house and uses it 8 out of 10 times he goes to the plate.

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Or, she could have been kicked by a mule and died the same day she would have died from rabies. Speculation gets you nowhere.

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A dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.

[/Jules Winnfield]

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skeeter lover.

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There have been examples of people becoming infected with rabies without being aware of any animal contact. These cases usually turn out to be due to rabid bats biting sleeping or impaired people, but because bats’ teeth are so small and sharp, little or no evidence of the bite is seen. Like with other animal hazards, maintaining separation is vital - even mosquito netting is usually sufficient to keep you safe.

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My sister, her husband, daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren all had to go through rabies shots because there was a whole colony of bats roosting in their attic. And it took forever for the critter removal folks to get rid of all the bats. Apparently they’d been living in the steeple of a church next door. When the church pulled the steeple down, they moved to my sister’s house.

I have no idea how much the vaccines cost with the medical services provided, but my company distributes it, and it’s less than $300/dose.

StG

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Being bitten isn’t the only way to become infected.

from wikipedia - “The disease is spread to humans from another animal, commonly by a bite or scratch.[1] Infected saliva that comes into contact with any mucous membrane is also a risk.”

Also from wikepedia - “Any warm-blooded animal, including humans, may become infected with the rabies virus . . . birds have only been known to be infected in experiments.” "Small rodents. . . and lagomorphs such as rabbits and hares, are almost never found to be infected . . . "

So any wild mammal is potentially a rabies carrier, not just bats. I had heard that the virus can be present in bat droppings, but the CDC websitesays that’s not true. So bats aren’t more likely to pass rabies on, once they are infected, than other mammals. You don’t want to have bats in your attic, or anywhere else in your house, of course. And you don’t want to handle them, or allow your children to handle them, any more than you’d want to handle any other wild mammal. Even wild bunnies will have fleas and ticks.

Separation is good. Fear isn’t necessary. I wouldn’t be afraid of a bat house in a neighbor’s garden, for instance. I wouldn’t put one in my yard because if one got sick and was on the ground, my stupid dogs would eat it.

Oh, and doctors are erring on the side of caution when they recommend the vaccine without a bite. I approve of that as a general practice. Although I once had a doctor recommend rabies shots when I got scratched by my cat (who had his shots), even though the cat was a house cat. The logic was that something warmblooded could have come into the house and the cat might have gotten its blood on his claws.

I considered that to be hypothetical odds, rather than small odds, so I took the cat scratch fever shot but declined the rabies shots. It worked out. If there had been an identified rabid animal in the vicinity, though, I’d have gone ahead and taken them, even if there was no known interaction between it and my cat. The odds would still be that I wasn’t infected, but this is rabies. You cover even small odds.

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I can sympathize after having recently been waiting on the call from the Health Department on whether or not the kitten I fostered that bit me a couple times had rabies or not. It did not but the poor thing had numerous problems so I could not rule it out based on it’s symptoms. I’ve had the pre-exposure vaccines but I still would require post-exposure shots if I were actually exposed and I am not willing to take a chance on a fatal disease. At least I live on a peninsula so our incidence of rabies cases is actually low compared to other areas.

I work at an animal hospital that takes in a lot of wildlife, which we then pass off to a wildlife rehabber. However, we try not to take full grown animals like adult raccoons because we do not want to risk handling them. Recently, we had one people brought in their carrier, it was not a baby or a full grown raccoon but a “teenager”, it was still pretty big and it was showing neurologic signs - circling, growling, falling over.* Sure there are other things that could have caused the signs but what I could not believe is that someone would see a wild animal behaving that way and actually handle it. I am all about saving animals but there has to be a point when common sense says “I don’t think I should touch that”.

*Animal services would not test it because no one was bitten or scratched.

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That wasn’t the point.

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Anamen Absolutely a human can be bitten by a bat and never know it. Even the big brown bat* has pretty tiny teeth.

Ylaria I’ve only come across literally two or three cases where a person claims to have contracted rabies without being bitten. They claimed it was through aerosol saliva in bat caves. Just doing research on the web revealed there was evidence of one patient handling wild bats with his bare hands. Another had bats come into contact with open lesions on his face and neck. I’ve seen zero evidence that breathing aerosol bat saliva can infect you with rabies. Breathing in bits of bat dung CAN cause toxoplasmosis (or was it histoplasmosis?). But that’s really only a risk for the very young, the very old, and the immuno compromised.

MrsTime Just what is your point? You hate bats. I accept that as your opinion. But you also stated some things that were factually untrue.

*That’s the name of the species. If you want the scientific name of the Common Brown bat, I can look in my Golden Guide To Bats.

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What was your point? You implied that she would be alive if it weren’t for the evil bats. I merely refuted your posturing with an equal amount.

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So is there any way to more or less eliminate rabies in bats without killing them all?

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And the pregnant, who have not been previously exposed. It’s still nice to get a nine month vacation from changing the cat litter, and have your husband do it the whole time.

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That footnote in my last post should read Big Brown Bat. The Common Brown Bat is a different species, and smaller.

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Outside of vaccinating every bat out there, I can’t think of one. At present, a MUCH more pressing concern is that White Nose Fungus is wiping out whole species here in North America.

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I don’t believe that anybody is saying that anybody in the vicinity of any bat should be vaccinated. However, anybody in the vicinity of a single bat acting strangely (for a bat) and particularly one that had tested positive for rabies (like in the OP) should be vaccinated.

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Holy crap guys I have just finished a course of (3 total) anti rabies shots in Phils. Total cost slightly more than $100. (it would have been half that for a local)

I’m finding it hard to see how your system can charge upto 20-30K. How do you tolerate that?