How does rabies affect animals

Doctors will treat your wound by washing it for at least 15 minutes with soap and water, detergent, or iodine. This protocol is known as post-exposure prophylaxis. Rabies is a preventable disease. There are simple measures you can take to help keep you from catching rabies:. Domestic animals, like dogs and cats, are responsible for the majority of animal bites.

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Foaming at the mouth is a rare physical symptom of drug overdose, seizures, and rabies. Health Conditions Discover Plan Connect. Symptoms Transmission Risk factors Diagnosis Cure Vaccine Prevention Rabies — the word probably brings to mind an enraged animal frothing at the mouth.

What are the symptoms of rabies? Most deaths due to rabies result from being bitten by an infected bat. In countries where dogs are not routinely vaccinated against rabies including most countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East , most deaths due to rabies result from being bitten by an infected dog. A few cases result from being bitten by other animals including monkeys, which are sometimes kept as pets. Rabies rarely affects rodents such as hamsters, guinea pigs, gerbils, squirrels, chipmunks, rats, and mice , rabbits, or hares.

In the United States, these animals have not been known to cause rabies among people. Rabies does not affect birds and reptiles.

In the United States, people who are bitten by rabbits and most small rodents—such as hamsters, gerbils, squirrels, rats, and mice—almost never need a rabies vaccination. Rabies symptoms appear when the rabies virus reaches the brain or spinal cord, usually 30 to 50 days after a person is bitten.

However, this interval can vary from 10 days to more than a year. The closer the bite to the brain for example, on the face , the more quickly symptoms appear. Rabies may begin with a fever, headache, and a general feeling of illness malaise. Most people become restless, confused, and uncontrollably excited. Their behavior may be bizarre. They may hallucinate and have insomnia. Saliva production greatly increases. Spasms of the muscles in the throat and larynx occur because rabies affects the area in the brain that controls swallowing, speaking, and breathing.

The spasms can be excruciatingly painful. A slight breeze or an attempt to drink water can trigger the spasms. Thus, people with rabies cannot drink. For this reason, the disease is sometimes called hydrophobia fear of water.

As the disease spreads through the brain, people become more confused and agitated. Eventually, coma and death result. The cause of death can be blockage of airways, seizures, exhaustion, or widespread paralysis.

The paralysis then moves through the body. In these people, thinking is typically unaffected, and most of the other symptoms of rabies do not develop. Examination and testing of samples of skin, saliva, and cerebrospinal fluid obtained by spinal tap.

Doctors suspect rabies when people have a headache, confusion, and other symptoms of the disease, especially if people have been bitten by an animal or exposed to bats for example, if they were exploring a cave. However, many people with rabies are unaware of having been bitten by an animal or exposed to bats.

A sample of skin is taken usually from the neck and examined under a microscope skin biopsy to determine whether the virus is present. Samples of saliva are also examined to check for the virus. A spinal tap Spinal Tap Diagnostic procedures may be needed to confirm a diagnosis suggested by the medical history and neurologic examination.

Electroencephalography EEG is a simple, painless procedure in which This sample is also examined. The polymerase chain reaction PCR technique, which produces many copies of a gene, is often used to identify the virus's unique DNA sequence in a sample of skin, cerebrospinal fluid, or saliva. Several samples of the fluids, taken at different times, are tested to increase the chances of detecting the virus. Avoiding being bitten by animals, especially wild animals, is best.

Any warm-blooded mammal can carry or contract rabies, but the primary carriers in North America are raccoons , skunks , bats , foxes and coyotes. Thanks to an increase in pet vaccinations, wildlife now account for more than 90 percent of all reported rabies cases.

Rabies tends to be more common in different species in different places, but is certainly not limited to these trends:. Federal and state wildlife officials have been vaccinating wildlife in many regions over the past two decades.

They distribute vaccine-laden baits that the target animals eat and thereby vaccinate themselves. Right now, oral rabies vaccination of wildlife focuses on halting the spread of specific types of rabies in targeted carrier species. It's hoped that this tool can also shrink the disease's range. Given all the media attention that rabies receives, it may be somewhat surprising to learn that very few people die from rabies nationwide each year. There are fewer than three fatalities each year nationwide, on average.

People who contracted rabies in the United States were mostly infected by a bat. Some may have been sleeping when bitten. Less than one-half of one percent of all bats in North America carries rabies.

Although raccoons suffer from rabies more than any other mammal in the United States about 35 percent of all animal rabies cases , only one human death from the raccoon strain of rabies has been recorded in the United States. Despite the long odds of contracting rabies, the remote possibility of infection exists and should not be taken lightly:. Since its launch in , World Rabies Day has helped educate over million people and vaccinated millions of dogs through events in countries.

Globally, World Rabies Day is important because most deaths from rabies occur in countries with inadequate public health resources and limited access to preventive treatment. Since , the World Health Organization has recommended vaccination—rather than removal—of free-roaming dogs to control rabies.

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