The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is raising awareness about the risks of contracting rabies from bats in the United States after three people, including a child, died from the disease between September and November 2021.
The three cases, described in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published Thursday, January 6, bring the total number of cases in 2021 to five, compared to no cases reported in people during 2019 and 2020.
Over a five-week period between September 28 and November 3, 2021, three people in Idaho, Illinois, and Texas were confirmed to have died of rabies after direct contact with bats in or around their homes.
Two of the bat-associated cases were considered preventable exposures: one was attributed to a nest found in the patient's home and the other to the victim picking up the bat without gloves.
Two patients let go of the animal, rather than capturing it to touch it. None of the three received post-exposure treatment, injections that can prevent the development of rabies if given before symptoms begin.
“We’ve come a long way in the United States to reduce the number of people who become infected with rabies each year, but this recent surge in cases is a sobering reminder that contact with these animals poses a real health risk,” said Ryan Wallace, a veterinarian and rabies expert in CDC’s Division of Pathology and High-Consequence Pathogens.
According to the agency, exposure to rabid bats is the leading cause of rabies in humans in the U.S., accounting for 70 percent of people who become infected.
The number of rabid bats reported to the National Rabies Surveillance System has remained stable since 2007, suggesting that this increase in cases in people may be due to a lack of awareness about the risks, and that obtaining proper treatment is a matter of life or death.
Bat bites do not always leave a visible mark, but they can still spread the rabies virus through infected saliva, so any direct contact should be evaluated by a clinical or public health provider.
It usually takes between three weeks and three months, although sometimes longer or shorter, for people to develop symptoms if they are infected. Proper treatment is effective in preventing rabies until symptoms develop. Once they begin, the disease is almost always fatal.
Therefore, CDC urges people to take the following steps to prevent or reduce the risk of rabies infection:
- Avoid direct contact with bats.
- If you have contact, do the following:
- Call your state or local health department or animal control to help trap the bat and perform testing to see if the bat has rabies and needs treatment.
- Contact your doctor or a local public health official to assess whether special treatment is needed.
These steps are important even if contact with a bat occurs through clothing and bite or scratch marks are not visible.
Sometimes it is not clear whether someone may have had contact with a bat, such as when someone is in a room with someone who is sleeping or where a child has been left unattended.
While rabies deaths in people nationwide are rare, the CDC estimates that about 60,000 people each year receive treatment to prevent contracting the disease.
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