An 11-year-old boy who woke to find a bat on his face later died of rabies \u2014 even though there were no warning signs that he\u2019d been scratched or bitten, according to a scientific paper highlighting the dangers this week.<\/p>\n
The unidentified youngster was staying with family in Northern Ontario, Canada, in the summer of 2024 when he suddenly woke up to find a bat lying directly on his nose and mouth, according to the study published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.<\/a><\/p>\n The boy swatted the animal away, and his father captured it and released it back outside.<\/p>\n An 11-year-old boy died of rabies after a bat landed on his face while he slept. Ivan Kuzmin \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n With no visible wounds and the child acting normally, his parents saw no need for concern or medical intervention \u2013 until about 19 days later, when he developed facial numbness and started persistently vomiting, the study said.<\/p>\n He was he was rushed to a local urgent care, where he was prescribed an antiviral drug, but his symptoms worsened, with facial weakness, slurred speech, fever, trouble swallowing, confusion and visual hallucinations.<\/p>\n His parents admitted him to a nearby hospital days later, where his neurological condition rapidly deteriorated \u2014 and doctors diagnosed rabies<\/a>, the first locally acquired case since 1967, the study noted.<\/p>\n After more than two weeks of aggressive treatment, the boy was removed from life support and died.<\/p>\n The distressing death was revealed in part to help raise awareness on how exposure to the deadly virus<\/a> can be easily missed after contact with bats, whose bites<\/a> are often so small they leave no visible trace.<\/p>\n \u201cIt 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,\u201d Dr. Brian Hummel, a pediatric infectious disease specialist involved in the case, wrote in his report.<\/p>\n The chilling encounter left no visible bite marks or scratches and tragically delayed the child\u2019s diagnosis until it was too late. Petr Smagin \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n With no visible wounds and the child acting normally, his parents saw no need for concern or medical intervention \u2013 until about 19 days later when he developed symptoms of rabies. Geza Farkas \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n \u201cIf you get symptomatic rabies infection, it is near universally fatal. But if you get the prevention before symptoms develop, it is near universally successful.\u201d<\/p>\n Only 28 rabies cases in humans have been reported in Canada since 1924.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An 11-year-old boy who woke to find a bat on his face later died of rabies \u2014 even…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":770681,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[150765,64,63,16468,2065,45457,128,338,1346],"class_list":["post-770680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-animal-attacks","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bats","tag-canada","tag-rabies","tag-science","tag-wildlife","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=770680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/770681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}