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Risk for rabies transmission from encounters with bats, Colorado, 1977-1996
W J Pape1, T D Fitzsimmons, R E Hoffman
1Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, Denver, USA.
Emerging Infectious Diseases
|May 26, 1999
Abstract:
To assess the risk for rabies transmission to humans by bats, we analyzed the prevalence of rabies in bats that encountered humans from 1977 to 1996 and characterized the bat-human encounters. Rabies was diagnosed in 685 (15%) of 4,470 bats tested. The prevalence of rabies in bats that bit humans was 2.1 times higher than in bats that did not bite humans. At least a third of the encounters were preventable.