Health officials are working to alert hundreds of people in dozens of states and several countries who may have been exposed to rabies in bat-infested cabins in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park over the past few months.
As of Friday, none of the bats found in some of the eight linked cabins at Jackson Lake Lodge had tested positive for rabies.
But the handful of dead bats found and sent to the Wyoming State Veterinary Laboratory in Laramie for testing were probably only a small sample of the likely dozens that colonized the attic above the row of cabins, Wyoming State Health Officer Dr. Alexia Harrist said.
I hate getting rabies
Here’s hoping this is all “better safe than sorry” precautions and no one was actually infected. Rabies fucking sucks. Even just the possibility of having it sucks.
It’s not an airborne disease though. You have to actually be bitten by a bat in order to become infected just being in the same room as them isn’t going to do it.
Bats don’t bite people as a general rule, even vampire bats tend to ignore humans, so if one did it would be noteworthy enough that you would probably do something about it.
A bat can bite you in your sleep (more likely to bite a human if rabid) and you may not even know you were bitten because they have tiny teeth.
Definitely worth notifying everyone that could have came in contact.
I’m aware of all of that. But it’s still necessary to assume the worst case for the past visitors since if it happened without one’s knowledge (while sleeping in the cabin, for instance), the only sign would be the onset of symptoms, at which point it’s far too late to do anything. Hence why rabies fucking sucks.
And to be clear, I have nothing against bats. I know it’s not a sinister bat-plot to infect humans with rabies. It’s just how things are, and precautions need to be taken.
Let me guess… Some of your best friends are bats, huh? So sus 😤
It might not be airborne. I read a paper years ago but can’t find it that a person who was in a cave known for a large bat population (I can’t remember of they were some kind of researcher or cave explorer) and they contracted rabies even though the were never bitten. They medical people figured the person could only have gotten infected via airborne particles from guano or bat urine, but it is the rare exception of that happening as the virus does not survive well at all outside the body.
Rabies is a horrible disease, and it’s good they’re being proactive about warning anyone of potential exposure. Luckily for the visitors, the rabies-bat connection, especially without a detectable bite is starting to be proven to be extremely unlikely to cause rabies infections in humans.
www.merlintuttle.org/rabies-in-perspective/
Researchers meeting at the 29th Annual North American Symposium on Bat Research, on October 30, 1999, passed a resolution stating that they “find no credible support for the hypothesis that undetected bites by bats are a significant factor in transmitting rabies to humans.”
That’s pretty interesting. I note “significant”, so not common, but not zero.
Ironically, in statistics, and in the application of statistics to science, a significant result is one that is measurably different from zero. So when a scientist says “no significant effect” they don’t mean “there is an effect, but not a significant one” they mean “there is no measurable effect”.
That STILL doesn’t mean it’s zero, like you said. But it does mean that if the effect was actually zero the data would still be the same. That’s because rabies data is famously unreliable. Often by the time they’re diagnosed, victims are nonverbal. We can get an idea of the species where the stain originated from, but that doesn’t mean that’s the animal that bit the person. If a bat bit a cat who bit a human the test would turn up bat. So was it a undetected bat bite, or a bat infection in a non-bat carrier? We’ll never know because the patient can’t explain anymore. Is it zero, is it a small amount? We don’t know. But what we do know is that if there is a connection between undetected bat bites and rabies in humans, that connection is weak enough to be undetectable using the data we have.
