I spend a not-insignificant amount of time thinking about all the
many dangers of West Africa – various horrifying parasites, mango flies, car accidents, diarrhea,
civil unrest, malaria, grotesque skin infections… and rabies.
I'm pretty sure that car accidents pose the most serious danger to Peace Corps Volunteers, and diarrhea
is the only thing on that list that is pretty much guaranteed to make my life
miserable (again) at some point. Still, each evening at dusk, as I watch a cloud of mid-sized bats that sweep out from wherever they shelter during the day, I wonder
how many mosquitoes they eat and also if any of them are carrying rabies.
As luck would have it, yesterday RadioLab released a mini-episode about rabies, which was totally interesting: http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2013/aug/13/rodney-versus-death/
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| Image courtesy of RadioLab & Wikimedia Commons |
We have plenty of rabies in America, but if you are bitten by something that might be rabid in the U.S. (probably a bat) you can go to the hospital and get a
series of (very expensive) preventative shots and you will almost certainly be completely
fine. However, if you are infected and don’t get those shots before
you start to feel symptoms, you will almost certainly die. Even if you're able to get (astronomically expensive
and controversial) experimental treatments, the odds are very much against your
survival. Basically, unless you have both world-class medical
care and miraculous luck, rabies is a death sentence, and an excruciating one at that.
According to Wikipedia, India has the world's highest rate of rabies in humans, followed by Vietnam and then Thailand. In Senegal (and also here in Guinea, I would guess) people periodically put out poisoned meat to kill off stray dogs, because they want to protect their chickens and sheep, because most people here don't have much affection for dogs, and because they know that dogs can carry rabies. Poisoning is neither humane nor pretty and I don't like that it happens, but people see that as their best option here. (I do like the tactics used to combat rabies in foxes in Western Europe, which involved baiting meat with an oral rabies vaccine and turned out to be quite successful, but that's a whole different context.)
In any case, when it comes to rabies I am about as well-protected as a person can be. During my training in Senegal I received
three rabies booster shots, and if I ever have the
misfortune of being bitten by some spazzy, drooling animal, I will call Peace
Corps, be rushed to a doctor, given a full round of preventative injections,
and probably be just fine.
I still wonder about the bats here, though.
