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.
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/
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.