United States: According to state health officials, a patient who was exposed to a bat in western Minnesota this year has died from rabies this week.
This has become the fifth death of a human from a treatable disease in the state since 1975, as stated by state officials.
More about the news
According to the Minnesota Department of Health, the investigation is still going on in the death case, and they did not clearly reveal if a bat had caused the rabies. However, they confirmed the patient had been exposed to a bat in July, the New York Times reported.
The US CDC has confirmed that the patient was diagnosed with rabies last month, which the Minnesota Department of Health revealed to public health.
About rising rabies
According to the CDC, around ten rabies deaths are annually reported in the US, where seventy percent of the deaths are caused by contact with bats.
Moreover, in past cases, in Minnesota, all of the cases were fatal and were recorded in 1917, 1964, 1975, 2000, 2007, and 2021, as per the department.
What more are the experts stating?
According to the department, “If left untreated, rabies is almost always fatal,” and “Rabies treatment has proven to be nearly 100 percent effective at preventing the disease after an exposure, but it must be started before symptoms of rabies appear,” the New York Times reported.
Moreover, as per the data, the patient involved in the recent incident case was related to an older 65-year-old adult, with no further information about gender, place of living, nature of exposure to the bat, etc.
According to the Brant County Health Unit in Brantford, Ontario, Ontario’s first domestic human rabies was recently reported since 1967, believing the case was also linked with a bat.
The person was later hospitalized, too, as per the unit.
As the Minnesota Department of Health mentioned, those exposed to rabies “are given an injection of rabies immune globulin and four doses of rabies vaccine over a two-week period,” the New York Times reported.