Yep, education is very important to be sure. Rabies transfers via saliva. An animal with this disease does not need to bite you to infect you.. hence.. always .. always .. always wash your hands when handling any wildlife. A sick bird for instance.. or a dead / sick animal.. one that is too approachable.. If you do handle it to move it.. or get care.. WASH.. every part that it's touched. It is too bad that more education has not been done.. but then again, I thought I taught my kids this pretty well.. haha and yet.. yeah. :/


Sammy

(my kids saw the bat being friendly, then it looked sick so they put it in a box.. continued their day by the river.. ate their food < ATE their food... brought the bat home.. next morning it was dead.. it tested positive for rabies.. ER for shots.. and still paying on that.. when all they had to do.. was NOT touch.. :/ )



________________________________
From: tweeters-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu <tweeters-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu> on behalf of Kelly McAllister <mcallisters4 at comcast.net>
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2016 6:37 PM
To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
Subject: RE: Accurate Rabies in Bats Information for Tweeters WAS: [Tweeters] Re: Bat close encounter, RFI


I spent a considerable amount of time on the phone with the Washington Department of Health's rabies expert and he insisted that the fact that Washington only has the bat strain of rabies does not mean that bats are the only mammal in Washington that have rabies and can infect you with a bite. I know that all of the cases of rabies in humans in recent decades have been traced to contact with bats but, apparently, you can't rule out rabid raccoons, skunks, coyotes, etc. in Washington. It makes no sense to me to see how prominently the Department of Health web site features this idea of a bat strain of rabies when knowledge of this small fact has essentially no practical value when it comes to taking proper precautions to prevent contracting the disease. That's what I got out of the conversation and I pressed on the subject of bats as the sole reservoir of rabies in Washington and was told, emphatically, that it's merely a reference to a strain of rabies that co-evolved with bats but could infect virtually any mammal and be passed on to other mammals.



Kelly McAllister

Olympia, Washington