Vampire Bat Causes First Bat-Rabies Fatality in U.S. | ThirdAge
A 19-year-old migrant farm worker who had been bitten while in his native Michoacan on July 15, 2011, 10 days before he left for the U.S. to pick sugar cane at a plantation in Louisiana.
"This case represents the first reported human death from a vampire bat rabies virus variant in the United States," the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in its weekly Morbidity and Mortality weekly report.
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The CDC warned that though vampire bat populations are currently confined to Latin America, climate change could result in a northward migration of their population, possibly leading to more cases of human infection in the southern United States.
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5 comments:
Another creature that kills humans because of CO2? I predict a bright future ahead for the vampire bat on the EPA's endangered species list.
Since we are cooling, on the other hand, we can expect such incidents to decrease as the viable living zone of vampire bats is pushed South.
I recall about 15 years ago that a woman from Massachusetts had been bitten by a rabid dog while trekking in Nepal, did not have it checked, and died three weeks after returning home to Massachusetts.
Did AGW cause that? And can we expect more Western trekkers dying from rabies after trekking, all due to AGW?
The syllogism in this article is preposterous. The CDC should be ashamed.
The only migration here was the teen crossing the border. The bat stayed home. But, as we all know, up is down, wrong is right, and the cow jumped over the moon....
I'm not sure what CDC meant to say, we have the statement from the bat conservation organization
"According to Bat Conservation International, "Bat rabies accounts for approximately one human death per year in the United States. Thus, some people consider bats to be dangerous." To put the rate in perspective," Merlin Tuttle, an active member of Bat Conservation International (BCI), states, "bicycle accidents killed 800 people, bee stings 95, and dog attacks 20 in the most recent year of reporting for the United States alone. Due to successful dog and cat vaccination programs, rabies is now the second rarest disease in the United States and Canada, behind polio." Clearly, bats do not rank very high among mortality threats to humans. Nevertheless, prudence and simple precautions can save lives.
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