Article content Rabies is rare. It didn’t used to be, but in the past 100 years, there have been only 28 cases in Canada. All were fatal.
The most recent one was last week, in Ontario. Rabies has the dubious distinction of having the worst case fatality rate of any disease. The mortality rate is almost 100 per cent.
There are rare cases of survival, but 59,000 people die of rabies every year worldwide and there have only been 30 recorded cases of a patient surviving the infection. The reason we don’t see rabies anymore is the introduction of the rabies vaccine and rabies immunoglobulin. Prompt action before symptoms start can save a life, which makes this child’s recent death such a tragedy.
The offending animal in this case was a bat, not a dog. Globally, rabid dogs account for 99 per cent of human cases , but in North America, mass vaccinations have largely eliminated rabies in canines. Here it remains present only in wild animals like raccoons, skunks, foxes and, most notably, in bats.
All domestic human cases in Canada since 1967 have been from bats. Most rabies is transmitted by infected saliva during an animal bite. Not every bite results in infection.
A bite through clothing is lower risk than a bite directly into the skin, and a bite to the head and neck is higher risk than a bite on an extremity. Bats pose a unique problem because their bites may be too small to be noticed at the time or may occur during sleep. Someone waking up to discover that a bat was in th.
