An 11-year-old Canadian boy has died from rabies after waking up with a bat on his nose and mouth.
Woken by the shock, the boy, who wasn’t named in the report, smacked the bat off his face.
Three days later, he was brought to a city hospital emergency department in Ontario with painful swallowing and vomiting.
However, the hospital discharged the child on a presumed diagnosis of herpes gingivostomatitis, which is sores in the lips or mouth caused by herpes.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency then also identified a bat rabies virus variant.
If administered promptly, before symptoms appear, rabies post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) — a treatment that includes vaccines and immune globulin, a medication that reduces the severity of infections — can prevent rabies.
“Bats may or may not show classic signs of rabies; hence, any direct human contact with bat is considered high risk,” the University of Manitoba doctors added. »