Not many people worry about rabies these days. As a child my brother and I used to put baking soda in our mouth and take a sip of vinegar before running inside to convince my mom we were bitten by rogue squirrels. That was about the extent of my experience with rabies, until recently. On we went to a famous surf beach in the south of Bali called Dreamland. After hanging out on the beach and laughing at people being taken out by some massive swells (bad karma) we went to a little cafe near the beach to eat some bbq corn on the cob.
There was a big monkey eating corn there too. At first he seemed fine so we didn't pay much attention to him, then he came up behind me and growled. I gave him my mostly eaten ear of corn, this did not apease the monkey, he jumped on the table and bit me in the back. Not an extremely painful bite, but you could see imprints of each of his teeth and four bleeding holes where his fangs are. Cool tattoo idea no?
It was weird because monkeys aren't usually aggressive and when you give them food they normally run off to eat their food gleefully. We washed the bite, first with Bintang as that was all we had on hand and then with ice and took off on our motorbikes for the hospital.
The monkey looked clean and was not foaming at the mouth and screaming like a maniac or anything, probably just a big aggressive male monkey. But there is still reason to be worried. Dogs and bats in the south of Bali have faced an outbreak of rabies which peaked in 2008 and is still worrisome. At least 17 people have died of rabies between 2008 and 2009 and there are possibly more cases as they tend to be underreported. Nearly all of these cases are in the south of the island (Tabanan/Ungasan).
Source: Flutrackers
So what should you do and how much should you worry if you are bitten by a wild animal in Bali? Upon contracting the rabies virus (most likely from an animal bite), the virus will work its way slowly but steadily to the brain – taking anywhere from 8 days to 2 months to do so. Once there, death is virtually a foregone conclusion – only a handful of people have ever survived after developing the terrible symptoms of rabies – delirium, an unquenchable thirst, and of course, the strong desire to bite another person!
In Bali rabies is only spread by stray dogs, usually in the south of the island. So if you are bitten by a dog, especially in the South it is important to go to the hospital immediately to have the wound cleaned and then receive a series of pretty painful rabies injections. The number of injections needed is based on weight and ranges in price from 1000-2000 US Dollars. The shots are given around the bite wound, which is pretty painful but still much better then dyeing a slow death of convulsions and dehydration.
For now no one has reported a monkey bite leading to a rabies death in Bali. This is not because monkeys do not contract rabies but because monkeys die pretty quickly from rabies once the symptoms show. However a monkey bite can infect a human with rabies just the same as any other animal infected with it can. If however, the monkey has been around another rabid animal and it was bitten, it can infect another animal or person. Note, rabies is deadly in monkeys just as it is in humans, so a monkey with rabies would not live very long.
The authorities in Bali have been criticized of being slow to react to the rabies epidemic and the biggest criticism is that the culling of the stray dogs is being done in a haphazard way. The other problem is that they have run out of vaccines, so if you are bitten by a dog in Bali you wont always be able to get the injections on the island.
The most important advice is to act quickly if an animal bites or scratches you:
• Wash the wound well with soap and water.
• See a doctor right away, even if you don’t feel sick or your wound is not serious. To prevent rabies, you may need to start a series of vaccinations immediately.
• To get vaccinated, be prepared to travel back to the United States or to another area. (Adequate vaccination for exposure to rabies is not available in all parts of the world.)
• After you return home, tell your doctor or state health department that you were bitten or scratched during travel.
I found the following story on NPR
Terrible Virus, Fascinating History In 'Rabid'
by NPR Staff
NPR - July 19, 2012
Here's your vocabulary word for the week: zoonosis. It describes an infection that is transmitted between species. For example, the disease that the husband and wife team of Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy have written about in their new book, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus.
Wasik is a journalist; his wife is a veterinarian, so the rabies virus seems like a natural topic for conversation. "Veterinarians spend a lot of time thinking about rabies, even though in this country, we hardly ever see it," Murphy tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "So I've been bringing home stories about rabies from my education and from my reading for a long long time."
Murphy's stories about rabies intrigued her husband. "I started to think about all the cultural resonances of that and even just of the word 'rabid,' " Wasik says. "So we realized that it would be fun for us to work on a book together about it."
Rabies is a terrible virus, causing immense suffering before it kills. "It's a really awful way to go," Wasik says, "but if you take a step back, you sort of have to admire it because it is one of those pathogens that actually compels the host to spread it."
The virus attacks the limbic system, which Murphy describes as the seat of anger, fear and desire. "The rabies virus creates a pretty effective rabies-spreading machine," she says, as maddened, infected animals bite and spread the disease through their saliva.
That idea of the infected bite that spreads madness and death is at the heart of many great modern horror narratives: Wasik says tales of vampires, werewolves and even zombies have some rabies in their DNA.
Rabies also, chillingly, blurs the line between human and animal. "I feel like that is the reason why we've always feared rabies more than is necessarily warranted by the number of people that it kills," he says. "The very disease itself is like a transfer of an animal essence to a human being ... the fear and the biting ... it is an animal aggression, transferred to us."
But rabies is rarely seen in this country; Murphy didn't see a rabid dog in person until she traveled to Indonesia during an outbreak. There were limited measures in place to control the spread of rabies; mostly, people shot the sick dogs. "Despite the large-scale culling efforts, the virus continued to spread around the island and many people died, so it's good that eventually the government came around to vaccination," she says.
That vaccine was originally developed by the French scientist Louis Pasteur in the 19th century; in fact, it was the first modern vaccine developed in the laboratory. Pasteur's work becomes even more remarkable when you consider the fact that he didn't really know what was causing rabies; he called the infectious agent a virus, but at the time, no one had ever seen a virus.
"I think that was Pasteur's great achievement," Murphy says, "that he adhered so fervently to the belief that for any infectious disease, there will be an infectious organism behind it ... that even when he couldn't see it under the microscope, he still went after it." [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]
