NSW Health is advising the public not to handle, or otherwise handle bats, following a recent increase in people being bitten or scratched across the state.<\/p>\n
In the two weeks from 28 September to 10 October, 43 people were assessed by NSW Health after being bitten or scratched by bats. This includes in coastal areas in Hunter New England, the Mid North Coast, Northern NSW, and the Central Coast.<\/p>\n
This is a significant increase when compared with 10 reported cases of bat bites or scratches for the same two-week period in 2025.<\/p>\n
Keira Glasgow, Director in Health Protection at NSW Health, said, \u201cWe want people to assume that any bat could carry Australian bat lyssavirus, which is a close relative to the rabies virus and very dangerous to humans.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cIf you see a bat that is injured or in distress, call your local wildlife rescue service and do not touch it. Only trained, protected and vaccinated wildlife handlers should interact with bats.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is incredibly rare for Australian bat lyssavirus to transmit to humans, but once symptoms of lyssavirus start in people who are scratched or bitten by an infected bat, sadly there is no effective treatment.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you are bitten or scratched by a bat, urgent medical assessment is crucial.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rabies virus and Australian bat lyssavirus (ABLV) belong to a group of viruses called lyssaviruses. These viruses transmit via a bite from an infected (“rabid”) animal. They all cause a similar illness known as rabies, which affects the central nervous system and is usually fatal.<\/p>\n
Rabies and ABLV infection cause similar symptoms. The early symptoms are flu-like, including headache, fever and fatigue. The illness progresses rapidly to paralysis, delirium, convulsions and death, usually within a week or two. Rabies cases and the three known human cases of ABLV infection have shown a wide variability in the time it takes for symptoms to appear following exposure to an infected animal (from several days to several years).<\/p>\n
The best way to protect yourself from infection is to not touch bats. If you see a bat in distress, injured or trapped on the ground, do not try to rescue it. Instead, contact trained experts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NSW Health is advising the public not to handle, or otherwise handle bats, following a recent increase in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":["post-629793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}