Rabies Part 2

Have You Been Exposed to It?

So after reading about the seroprevalence studies in high risk human populations for rabies virus which I highlighted here:

I had a thought. Have I ever been personally exposed to RABV? Have you? Most of us know that rabies comes about from a bite from an infected animal. The most common carriers in North America are supposedly bats, raccoons, foxes and skunks.

I’ve never been vaccinated for it, but I’m a nature loving type. Despite that no wild animal has ever bitten me to my knowledge. Bats, racoons, skunks, chipmunks, bears, foxes and coyotes seem to like me well enough to have thus far left me alone, as do non rabies carriers such as snakes and sharks. There is the exception of a monkey in Thailand that attacked me in 2003 or so, which was chained to a motorbike, but that one despite biting me multiple times never once broke my skin. At the time this was hilarious to my now ex boyfriend and concern about rabies transmission was the farthest thing from either of our minds. Being that this was over 20 years ago I’d assume I’m okay even if to this day I still don’t like monkeys.

I’ve never been bitten by a dog that broke skin, either in the USA or Thailand, though I was attacked once. When I was 14 years old a Rottweiler named Roxie in the barn at a friend’s father’s house lunged and threw me to the ground. I held onto her spiked collar with both hands for dear life as her teeth thrashed above me until my friend’s stepbrother was able to pull the dog off of me. This was terrifying but this was a guard dog trained to be just that and I was a stranger in her territory.

I always remember the way that dog acted before she lunged. Her ears were upright, her eyes steely, her tail stump parallel to the ground. My friend’s stepbrother had given Roxie some type of stand down command and I, being young and fairly inexperienced with dogs, tried to pet the girl. The Rottweiler let out a barely perceptible low throated growl stuck in a grimace at the back of its mouth. These are all signs of a dog that means business. Back away slowly out of its territory if you can.

This picture is fairly accurate:

Remarkably, though, I was not bitten, though had the dog not been wearing a collar I would have been badly mauled and possibly even killed. She was on top of me and going for my throat. I like dogs despite this encounter, though I personally would not want to have Rottweilers or Pitbulls or a few other classes of dogs as family pets due to this incident. The way that they can turn on a dime is astonishing. Afterwards the dog acted like nothing had ever happened. We did not get authorities involved.

Over the years I’ve had playful dogs, usually puppies, that have tried to bite but those have also never broken skin. Now the USA was declared canine rabies free some years ago, though what this means is that dog variants of rabies are not spreading. Thailand, meanwhile, is considered a high risk canine rabies transmission country. It’s so high risk, in fact, that the CDC made it defacto impossible to bring your dog from Thailand to the USA. I know all about this and will circle back to it. Because of this CDC ban I heard of many service dogs in Afghanistan, say, who were not allowed to come to America with their owners following that disastrous withdrawal fallout.

The CDC ban on dogs from high risk countries was one of the things that clued me that something was not right. The dog already needs to have a rabies vaccine to get through Thailand export controls, so if the jabs work what is the point of the ban? If the jabs don’t work what is the point of requiring them?

On going through seroprevalence studies of rabies in animal populations, however, it occured to me that I might have been exposed to it. I’ve never been a fur trapper and I don’t live in an area where vampire bat depradation is common. Although sheep, deer and horses sometimes test positive for rabies I’ve never been bitten by one of those either. But a surprisingly overlooked animal was high on the list of carriers.

That animal is…