As is typical for this time of year, the annual US rabies report has been published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (Ma et al, 2018).
Here are some highlights:
I realize headline writers are trying to attract attention, and sometimes they don’t know much about the content. As a result, some headlines are quite over the top, and that can freak people out. Here are some examples from the past couple of days:
4 year old girl catches life-threatening infection by trying on shoes
Human deaths from rabies are common in some developing countries (where tens of thousands die from canine rabies every year) but rare in developed countries. It’s an almost invariably fatal disease, but at the same time it’s almost completely preventable because of the quality of vaccines and post-exposure prophylaxis available. Getting those treatments to the
A couple times in the past few weeks, I’ve had questions along the lines of “Bat rabies isn’t really a big deal, is it?” and “How common in rabies in bats? It’s not really that common, right?”
We don’t know how common rabies is in the bat population, since most testing
This month, Public Health Ontario released a new Rabies Guidance Document for Healthcare Providers. It’s nothing particularly new but a good review of the recommended response to rabies exposure from various animal species, something that’s unfortunately often messed up or made more complicated than necessary. It includes some nice flowcharts, such as the one
When a bat is found in a household, the response can be quite variable. Many public health units may consider it a potential rabies exposure if the bat was in the house overnight, on the assumption that a bite could have occurred without being noticed (I have personal experience with that). Based on the
The latest edition of CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports describes a case of rabies in a Missouri man. Rabies is rare in people in the US, but it remains an ever-present risk because the virus circulates in various wildlife species. (This case seems to have been from 2014, but they missed some proofreading
MERS-CoV, the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus, continues to cause infections (often fatal) and confusion. For a while now, there’s been speculation that camels are the source of this virus, based in part on how commonly antibodies against the virus (or a related virus) are found in healthy camels. It always seemed strange, though
Rabies is a very serious disease. We’re very lucky in Canada that in most parts of the country the prevalence of this disease is now quite low, in large part due to wildlife control and vaccination efforts. Unfortunately that also seems to make some people quite lax when it comes to (common sense) things like
Not many days go by when I don’t get a few calls about rabies. Here are a couple from yesterday that highlight some important issues.
An indoor cat tangled with a bat. The bat’s no longer around to test so this is considered a potential rabies exposure (bats being important rabies vectors, and catching and
