Friday, August 24, 2012

Possibly Rabid Bat at Baltimore Ravens game

It sounds like an after-the-fact nightmare.  You're sitting happily at a pre-season football game with your family and the newspaper says that there was a bat fluttering oddly in your section.  Do you go to get shots?  This happened Wednesday night in Baltimore

A bat landed on a person sitting in section 500 of M&T Bank Stadium as the Ravens played the Detroit Lions in a preseason game, officials said. It isn't known whether the bat had rabies because the person brushed it off and the bat flew away. But health officials said it's possible other people seated in the area could have touched the bat.

I'm not sure what I would do.  Lose sleep most likely.  If the bat flew away, it most likely was not rabid.  Rabid bats generally do not fly normally.  

Rabid bats may show abnormal behavior, such as outdoor activity during daylight; rabid bats may be grounded, paralyzed or may bite a person or animal. Not all rabid bat act abnormally, but bats that do are more likely to have rabies.


Monday, August 13, 2012

Scoutmaster Attacked; Scouts Kill Rabid Beaver

A rabid beaver attacked a scoutmaster in Eastern Pennsylvania as he was swimming with a group of teenage scouts.

According to a story in the Poughkeepsie Journal, the scoutmaster saw a dark shape that loomed up from the water and bit him on the chest.

Once he was bitten, he grabbed the animal and threw it away from his body. “Then it came at me again,” he said.
The beaver bit him in the leg and then again in his buttocks, arm, hand and waist. At that point, Brousseau said, “the adrenaline kicked in.”
“I grabbed it in its mouth,” he said. “I had it around its bottom jaw as tightly as I could because I knew it was going to either bite me or bite the boys. I called the Scouts to come give me a hand.”

The boys pulled their scoutmaster to shore; the beaver was thrown to the ground, stunned, and the boys stoned it to death.   Duchess County officials confirmed the next day that the beaver was rabid.  The scoutmaster has received a regimen of rabies shots -- 20 so far.

While beaver attacks are rare, see below for the story of an attack last summer, and there are reports that the beaver who bit two girls in North Caroline last month was rabid.  The girls are also getting shots.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

NYTimes Story on India's Rabid Dog Menace

According to a thorough and thoroughly scary story in today's New York Times, India suffers more than any other country from stray dogs and the rabies they carry:
 Free-roaming dogs number in the tens of millions and bite millions of people annually, including vast numbers of children. An estimated 20,000 people die every year from rabies infections — more than a third of the global rabies toll.
After a 2001 law was passed forbidding the killing of stray dogs, the dogs have multiplied and are a fanged public nuisance.
India’s place as the global center for rabid dogs is an ancient one: the first dog ever infected with rabies most likely was Indian, said Dr. Charles Rupprecht, chief of the rabies program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Dog bites cause 99 percent of human rabies deaths
Is anyone doing anything?  I hope this story will help!