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Comment by james_pm | Hacker News Reader

Do not ever touch bats. Never ever. If you do touch a bat, go to the ER and tell them you touched a bat.

I mean, in Europe, bats carry rabies - something like 1% of them - but there have been a grand total of three rabies cases in the last 50 years from bat bites across the entire continent.

As to mice and rats - the chance of getting rabies from them is negligible, anywhere - they usually end up incapacitated and dead through predation extremely rapidly.

I’ve been bitten by all of the above. No treatment beyond dousing the wounds with peroxide.

The closest a mouse ever came to killing me was when it pushed a rock out of a wall in the hovel in which I lived, which smashed the headboard of the bed a few inches from my skull.

I feel like this is all something that has been pushed by the American insurance industry. Again - 43 deaths in 50 years. Negligible.

If you really cared about risk management, you would never, ever get in a motor vehicle, and you would have insurance for putting on your pants in the morning.

Like so many things, rational risk management is overtaken by fear and emotion.

We had a bat in our bedroom here in France a couple of years ago. We weren't quite sure what to do so checked online and the diametrically opposed advice was hilarious. US sources read like this thread, whereas the French ones were like leave your windows open to allow them to fly out and a bunch of links to why bats are amazing and protected animals.

I guess the incidence rate is a bit higher in the US but yeah interesting risk management.

On a lot of stuff, the US and EU advice are radically different. EU doctors would jail American doctors for the way we circumcise children with no requirement for it.

At the time I write this comment, the thread has been up for 9 hours and has 130 comments. I can't claim to have read them all, but in my scan of the entire page, yours is the only one I could find focusing on the actual facts instead of the fear-mongering.

I'm disappointed in this community. I suppose it's not fair to expect a lot of deep zoology background here, but damn.

More information on a balancing perspective can be found here: https://www.merlintuttle.org/rabies-in-perspective/

Very good article. While I normally am terrified of rabies, this helps me reduced that fear, and not worry because a bat flew by overhead.

I know in the US we only get 2-3 cases per year, and the OP case is the first in 3 years I think? All of our cases are known to be direct contact with bats/animals and the people should've known to get help.

What a weird take on risk management, I hope you aren’t responsible for managing anyone’s risk besides your own.

You’re advocating against the reason that rabies deaths are so few in your locality and dismissing the monumental amount of effort that went into making it so rare.

There are ~60,000 rabies deaths annually, most from places without access to prophylactic vaccination, and there is little to no public initiatives to control carrier populations or educate the public about the risks.

I’m arguing that risk should be managed based on logic and rationale, not emotion and fear.

To call the entirety of Europe “my locality” is, uh, very American of you.

And yes - rabies deaths from primate and dog bites are more common in undeveloped countries - but 60,000 p.a. is still a vanishingly small number compared to, say, malaria (600,000), TB (1,400,000), hep (1,100,000), diarrhoea (1,500,000), flu (650,000), schistosomiasis (200,000), and cars (1,300,000). I suppose the latter two aren’t scary, because you haven’t heard of one of them, and you use the other every day. There are bigger fish to fry.

Fortunately, dogs (and cats) are universally vaccinated against rabies in Europe, and we have no primates.

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