An elderly woman died and more than two dozen people were treated for possible rabies exposure after her family failed to realize that a nighttime encounter with a bat put her at risk of rabies.
Last August, the woman awoke in her Wyoming home and felt a bat on her neck. She swatted it away and washed her hands. Her husband captured the bat with gloved hands and released it outside.
The woman didn't seem to have any bite wounds, so the couple didn't call a doctor, according to an account of the incident published Thursday in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
More than a month later, after she had been hospitalized for eight days for a mystery illness, her family remembered the bat.
Lab tests quickly showed that her slurred speech, weakness and respiratory failure were not from Guillain-Barre syndrome, as doctors had thought, but from rabies.
The woman's husband, another family member and 22 health care workers had to receive post-exposure rabies treatment. Two other people who had contact with the woman also chose to receive the treatment, despite not having exposures that would necessarily require it.
All of this could have been prevented if the family had understood the risk of rabies. But they never got information that could have helped them — even though they had made multiple phone calls to officials over the years to talk about the removal of bats that lived under the eaves of their home. (NPR)
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