Bat in the house - rabies scare!

   / Bat in the house - rabies scare! #41  
We live on the edge of a forest with a lot of shagbark hickory, which I am told bats love. We have had bats in the house but the most memorable was a few years ago.

My wife and I were in the family room and I looked over at her chair and told her “DON’T MOVE”. I left the room to get some supplies and she very obediently stayed still, shrinking from the side of the chair, dreading seeing a spider(?) coming over the arm, and wondering where I went. I came back with a bucket and piece of cardboard and successfully captured a bat! When I told her what was under the bucket she did kind of freak out, could be that childhood trip and a cabin full of bats, go figure. I tossed the bucket and bat outside and it started crawling back toward the house. She very astutely locked the deadbolt; no bat is going to get back in her house. Oh, and by the way, the words “Don’t Move” are pretty much gone from my vocabulary.

Doug in SW IA
 
   / Bat in the house - rabies scare! #42  
The hummers can/do buzz very close to my face also. I always wear my reading glasses when refilling the feeder. I'm pretty sure they are just excited at getting more sugar water. But there is no need to take unnecessary chances.
Around here in the spring, the hummers go for wild current flowers. I started to propagate more of them around the place. The currents actually are attractive bushes, to me at least. Bright reddish pink flowers, among the first to show up in spring time right about the time the humming birds show up.
 
   / Bat in the house - rabies scare! #43  
I can't remember the last time I was bitten by a mosquito. The swallows by day and the bats by night. My five acre lake provides the perfect breeding area for mosquitos.
 
   / Bat in the house - rabies scare! #44  
We have bats and swallows and mosquitos, and lions and tigers and bears. Oh my.
 
   / Bat in the house - rabies scare! #45  
No rattlesnakes, tarantulas or scorpions though.
 
   / Bat in the house - rabies scare! #48  
Off my news feed this am.
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Lake County, IL man dies of rabies, 1st human case in 67 years after bat bite

By Liz Nagy and ABC7 Chicago Digital Team
Tuesday, September 28, 2021 11:24PM

Rabies in humans is extremely rare but a Spring Grove man became the first case and death in Illinois since 1954.

LAKE COUNTY, Ill. (WLS) -- A Lake County man has become the first human case of and death from rabies in Illinois since 1954, health officials said.

The Illinois Department of Public Health said in mid-August, a man in his 80s woke to find a bat on his neck. The bat was captured and tested positive for rabies. While health officials told the man he needed to start post-exposure rabies treatment, he declined.

"They have very small teeth and so if you were asleep or unaware, you might not notice necessarily that you've been bitten. You might not feel it," said Liza Lehrer, assistant director of the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo.

Health officials said a month later he began experiencing rabies symptoms, and died. The McHenry County coroner identified the man as 87-year-old Spring Grove resident Thomas Krob. While Krob was a resident of Lake County, he died at a McHenry County hospital.

Symptoms of rabies infections include neck pain, headache, difficulty controlling arms, finger numbness and difficulty speaking. In Krob's case they took a month to appear.

IDPH officials said people who had been in contact with Krob's bodily fluids were assessed and given rabies preventative treatment as needed.

Rabies is exceedingly rare in humans, with only one to three cases reported each year, rabies exposure is still common. An estimated 60,000 Americans receive post-exposure vaccinations every year. Without preventative treatment, rabies is fatal.

Bats are the most common species with rabies in Illinois. IDPH officials said they found a bat colony in Krob's home.

"You might not even be aware you have a colony of bats in your attic," Leherer "Occasionally they might be following air pathways or wind tunnels or something that might bring them downstairs to living quarters."

Officials said so far this year 30 bats have tested positive for rabies in Illinois, and more than 1,000 bats are tested for rabies each year after possible rabies exposure. Approximately 3% of tested bats test positive for rabies.
 
   / Bat in the house - rabies scare! #50  
Last year we somehow accidentally had a bat enter the house and stay hiding probably one day & night or so without us knowing about it.
Following evening it ended up flying above our heads while we were watching TV and it just landed in a bookshelf above big TV screen.

No time to panic, had to do something in a hurry!

So I plugged in the house central vacuum hose and managed to suck it away with the hose the first try.

Since it had stayed overnight in the house, our county Health Dept. wanted to test the dead bat for rabies and lucky for us found it negative!


My neighbor was not so lucky - somehow he got scraped by a bat when outside, and he ended up having to get whole bunch of rabies shots as a precaution $$$ !

Cheers
Had one in the house in Vermont once. Wife sucked it up in the vacuum. Kept vacuum running and took bag out outside.
 
 
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