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Comment by jordache | Hacker News Reader

they allowed bats to walk on their beds at night? WTF

To be fair bats are pretty harmless when they aren’t infected with rabies.

To be fair, in quite a few places bats are the main rabies infection vector.

USA is one of those locations, but bats have approximately 0.5% infected rate estimated. 6% measured, but when you take into account that most of the tested bats were sickly, injured, easily captured, etc. Overall, it is very hard to measure, so it is pretty safe to assume around 0.5%[0]

[0]: https://batworld.org/rabies-info/

The places where bats are the main rabies infection vector are generally places where rabies is extremely rare[1], such as the US with 1-2 cases per year. ~99% of human rabies cases globally are from dogs[2], unsurprisingly these are mostly in places where dogs are not usually vaccinated.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/bats/education/index.html

[2] http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/rabies

Yes and when a bat has a 10% chance of carrying rabies you get a rabies shot it you come into contact with one.

Yes, the odds of you getting it are small, but the downside is that if you do get it you’re almost guaranteed to die.

The number is probably way below 10%, but yes obviously getting the shot is still a very good idea.

Though the other nasty thing is that getting rabies shots cost thousands or in some cases tens of thousands of dollars in the US, which leaves a lot of people with the choice between bankruptcy or some unknown probability of getting rabies and the subsequent guaranteed death.

WA state for example: between 3-10% of bats submitted for testing are found to be rabid (this is from the DOH website). Yes, 10% is the high number in some years.

Bats that have been submitted for testing are not likely representative of the overall bat population.

Bats that have been submitted for testing are likely fairly representative of the bat population that is likely to bite you.

The issue with getting a rabies shot if you come into contact with them is that in the USA, it can cost $3,000 easily ($1634 to $8415)[0]. Which when you assume most people live in a household, can be quite expensive. And if you look at the exposure to bats vs. human infected rate of rabies, it is so exceedingly rare.[1]

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5525325/ [1]: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/48/11/1493/347031

The article seems to suggest that the victim wasn't suspicious because he wasn't knowingly bitten or scratched and could have either simply not noticed or caught it via a saliva path.

Very good point :)

Two points - to be precise ...

Points taken :P

We have enough bat rabies in our community that our recommendation would be vaccination even with just trivial contact. It's our #1 reservoir.

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