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An 11-year-old boy died of rabies after coming into contact with a bat, even though there were no visible bite marks on his body.
The child was staying with his family in northern Ontario, Canada, in the summer of 2024 when he woke up to find that a bat had come to rest on his nose and mouth, according to a new study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
The boy knocked the animal off his face and his father later captured and released it into the wild, the New York Post reports.
The 11-year-old’s parents weren’t immediately concerned about the incident because the boy had no bite marks and was otherwise acting fine. However, 19 days after finding the bat on his face, he began to experience numbness in his face and frequent vomiting, the study said.
His parents rushed him to urgent care for treatment, where he was prescribed an antiviral drug. The child’s symptoms continued to worsen; his face became weak, his speech slurred, and he experienced fever, confusion, visual hallucinations, and he had trouble swallowing.
The family took him back to a hospital for treatment the following day, but his neurological condition deteriorated quickly. At that point, doctors diagnosed him with rabies — making the child the first rabies case in the area since 1967, according to the study.
The boy was treated for two weeks but was then removed from life support and died.
The journal published the paper in part to raise awareness about the potential for disease transmission from bats. Some bats have teeth that are so small that they leave no visible sign of bites.
“It was important to us and to the family to take the opportunity to find learning experiences and lessons that we could take from his case to try and help spread awareness and understanding of rabies infection and risks,” pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr Brian Hummel said in the report.
There is no cure for rabies once the infection takes hold. Preventing symptoms through early treatment is key to surviving a brush with the disease, according to the doctor.
“If you get symptomatic rabies infection, it is near universally fatal. But if you get the prevention before symptoms develop, it is near universally successful,” he said.
Thankfully, rabies infections are rare. There have only been 28 rabies cases reported in humans in Canada since 1924. While human rabies cases are more common in the U.S., fewer than 10 people die every year from the disease, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
