Incidents Highlight Bats’ Role in Rabies

U.S. health officials are trying to contact 50 people who were on an airline flight along with a bat. The bat flew around the cabin while the plane was in the air, the Associated Press reported August 13. This occurred on a Delta flight from Wisconsin to Atlanta. A passenger caught the incident on video, but nobody caught the bat. Therefore, officials don’t know if it had rabies. Officials want to find out if any passengers had close contact with the bat. If so, they could be advised to get rabies shots. In an unrelated incident, U.S. officials said last week that a 19-year-old man has died in Louisiana from rabies. He was the first to die of the disease in the United States after being bitten by a vampire bat. The man, a migrant farm worker, had been bitten in Mexico a few weeks earlier, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.