Tag: rabies vaccines

When Was the Last Time Someone Died from Being Bitten by a Rabid Dog in the United States?

Most people aren’t overly worried about rabies these days, at least not in the United States.

In the mid-1950s, rabies control programs began to get more and more dogs vaccinated against rabies.
In the mid-1950s, rabies control programs began to get more and more dogs vaccinated against rabies.

Is that because rabies isn’t around anymore?

Of course not. It is because a rabies vaccine has long been available both to prevent our pets from getting rabies from wild animals and to protect us if we are ever bitten by an animal that might have rabies.

Hopefully, especially after the recent rabies death of the 6-year-old in Florida, everyone understands that rabies is still around.

When Was the Last Time Someone Died from Being Bitten by a Rabid Dog in the United States?

Since 2008, at least 21 people have died of rabies in the United States, mostly after getting exposed to rabid bats.

There were more than a few exposures from dogs with rabies too. In fact, the last rabies death after a dog bite was not very long ago – it was in May 2017.

Exposure to rabid dogs typically happened while the person was out of the United States.
Exposure to rabid dogs typically happened while the person was out of the United States.

Does that mean that something isn’t working with our rabies prevention plans?

When you take a closer look at the statistics about rabies deaths after dog bites, it becomes clear where the problem is.

“In 1950, for example, 4,979 cases of rabies were reported among dogs, and 18 cases were reported among humans. Between 1980 and 1997, 95 to 247 cases were reported each year among dogs, and on average only two human cases were reported each year in which rabies was attributable to variants of the virus associated with indigenous dogs . Thus, the likelihood of human exposure to a rabid domestic animal in the United States has decreased greatly.”

Human Rabies Prevention – United States, 1999 Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)

Most rabies deaths in the United States from dogs occur in people who get bitten while they are traveling outside the country.

So when was the last human rabies death from a rabid domestic dog in the United States?

A 7-year-old girl died after she was bitten by a rabid dog in Texas in June 1979. Before that, in 1968, a 13-year-old boy died after getting bit by a rabid dog in Kansas.

That’s a long time ago.

Does that mean the rabies vaccine isn’t necessary anymore?

Rabies Vaccines Work

Of course not! That means the rabies vaccines works!

Two Indonesian boys proudly show off their puppy and her vaccination record.
Two Indonesian boys proudly show off their puppy and her vaccination record. Photo by the rabiesalliance.org.

There are two reasons that we don’t see human rabies deaths from dog bites in the United States anymore, unless the bites occur in another country:

  1. Most of us vaccinate our pets – fewer dogs and cats with rabies means that there are fewer chances for us to get bit and get rabies.
  2. Most folks get proper treatment if they are exposed to an animal that could possibly have rabies, whether it is an unvaccinated dog or cat, or a raccoon, skunk, fox, coyote, or bat. In fact, about 40,000 to 50,000 people in the United States get rabies post-exposure prophylaxis each year.

If you don’t believe this, just look back at what rabies was like in the pre-vaccine era, when dogs and cats would get rabies, and so would their owners. In the early 1960s and 1950s, rabies deaths from dog bites were more common, about 10 each year.

“The number of rabies-related human deaths in the United States has declined from more than 100 annually at the turn of the century to one or two per year in the 1990’s. Modern day prophylaxis has proven nearly 100% successful.”

CDC on Rabies in the U.S.

To understand just why rabies vaccines still so necessary,  you can also look at what is still happening around the world where rabies vaccines aren’t used as commonly as they are in more industrialized countries.

“Despite substantial gains in tackling this neglected disease, more than 20,000 people still die from rabies every year, mostly in Asia and Africa.”

Schneider et al on Substantial reductions in rabies, but still a lot to be done

In addition to the deaths from folks traveling outside the United States, there are many more rabies deaths in people, mostly children, who live in areas where rabies is still endemic.

Hopefully these deaths will end soon too, as experts from WHO, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the Global Alliance for Rabies Control (GARC) work together in the United Against Rabies collaboration to achieve “Zero human Rabies deaths by 2030.”

Because it has an animal reservoir, the rabies virus will likely always be around, and won’t be eradicated like smallpox, but hopefully we can one day control rabies by having fewer rabies exposures (vaccinate more of our pets) and we can eliminate dog-transmitted rabies deaths.

We won’t get there if folks continue to push myths and propaganda about rabies and the rabies vaccine.

What to Know About Controlling Rabies and Rabies Deaths

It has been a long time since someone in the United States died with rabies from a domestic dog bite, but that is simply a testament to the fact that vaccines work.

More on Controlling Rabies and Rabies Deaths

Why Did France Take the Rotavirus Vaccine off Their Schedule?

Have you heard that France took the rotavirus vaccine off their immunization schedule?

Why?

It was supposedly because two babies died of intussusception after being vaccinated.

Rotavirus Vaccines and Intussusception

Intussusception? Wasn’t that just a risk from RotaShield, the original rotavirus vaccine?

While the risk was higher with RotaShield, the current rotavirus vaccines do have a small risk of intussusception.

france-immunization-schedule
The French immunization schedule is published in the Bulletin épidémiologique hebdomadaire and has never included the rotavirus vaccine.

So did France take the rotavirus vaccine off of their schedule?

Technically, France hadn’t yet added the rotavirus vaccine to their schedule, but it had been available since 2006 and they did formally recommend infants get vaccinated beginning in November 2013.

That recommendation was suspended in April 2015, after they recorded 47 cases of intussusception over an 8 year period. This included 14 cases that required surgery and tragically, two deaths, including one child who died at home without getting any medical care. The other developed intussusception after the third dose of vaccine, which is not usually linked to any increased risk.

It is important to note that at least 80 other countries, including the United States, Finland, Germany, Norway, and the UK, haven’t stopped using the rotavirus vaccine.

Why not?

Because the risks of a natural rotavirus infection are much greater than the risk of intussusception. In other words, the benefits of the vaccine exceed its risks.

In France alone, for example, it is estimated that rotavirus vaccines could prevent 30,000 emergency room visits, 14,000 hospitalizations, and 8 to 17 deaths each year, all in children under the age of three years.

And even without the rotavirus vaccine, there are about 200 to 250 spontaneous intussusceptions each year in France. Fortunately, infants with intussusception can almost always be successfully treated, often without surgery.

Why Did France Take the Rotavirus Vaccine off Their Schedule?

It actually makes no sense that France stopped recommending that infants get vaccinated with one of the rotavirus vaccines.

The decision was widely condemned and there are calls to reassess the decision and put the rotavirus vaccine back on the schedule in France.

“After the surprising decision of the CTV-HCSP of April 2015 to suspend its own recommendation for widespread vaccination against Rotavirus (following a false and misleading pharmacovigilance report) against the international recommendations, we advise you to read the meta-analysis on efficacy (in comparative studies) and the effectiveness (field efficacy) of these vaccines.”

InfoVac Bulletin Novembre 11/2016

The benefits of the rotavirus vaccines far outweigh its risks.

“The estimated benefits of vaccination in our study greatly exceed the estimated risks and our results should contribute to provide further evidence for discussions around rotavirus vaccination in France.”

Larmrani et al A benefit–risk analysis of rotavirus vaccination, France, 2015

Why did France take the rotavirus vaccines off their schedule?

News of the Newark kids going to Paris to get Pasteur's rabies vaccine made the front page of the New York Times.
In 1885, four boys from New Jersey went all of the way to France to get Pasteur’s new rabies vaccine, which wasn’t yet available in the US.

That’s a good question.

Another good question? How many infants have died of rotavirus infections since they did? And when will they put the vaccine back on the schedule? Fortunately, the rotavirus vaccines are still available in France, they weren’t banned as some folks say.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that France impulsively suspended a vaccine.

In 1998, France suspended the routine vaccination of teens against hepatitis B because of the possible association of the vaccine with multiple sclerosis. This was done amid “pressure from anti-vaccine groups and reports in the French media have raised concerns about a link between HBV immunisation and new cases or relapses of MS and other demyelinating diseases,” even though “scientific data available do not support a causal association between HBV immunisation and central nervous system diseases, including MS.”

“In 1998, official concerns were first voiced over a possible association between hepatitis B virus (HBV) vaccination and multiple sclerosis (MS). Despite a number of studies that have demonstrated no such association, ten years on the French population’s confidence in the vaccine remains shaken and immunization rates of infants have stagnated beneath 30%. With a chronic carriage of the virus estimated at 0.68%, it seems unlikely that France will be able to control the circulation of the virus. ”

Marta Balinska on Hepatitis B vaccination and French Society ten years after the suspension of the vaccination campaign: how should we raise infant immunization coverage rates?

Do you know where all of this has left France now?

With high rates of vaccine-preventable disease (15,000 cases of measles in 2011, with 16 cases of encephalitis and 6 deaths) and a move towards vaccine mandates. As of January 2018, all infants and toddlers in France must receive DTaP, Hib, HepB, pneumococcal, MMR, and meningococcal C vaccines.

What to Know About France Taking the Rotavirus Vaccine off Their Schedule

In no longer recommending the rotavirus vaccines, officials in France actually put infants at greater risk for sickness and death.

More on France Taking the Rotavirus Vaccine off Their Schedule

 

What to Do If Your Child Is Exposed to Rabies

Do kids still get rabies?

Tragically, most folks know that they do because of the story of the unvaccinated 6-year-old boy in Florida who died after being exposed to a rapid bat earlier this year.

Getting Exposed to Rabies

Rabies is a vaccine-preventable disease.

Unlike most other vaccine-preventable diseases though, unless you are at high risk for getting rabies, you don’t typically get the rabies vaccine unless you have already been exposed to rabies.

How does one get exposed to rabies?

Now that most people get their pets vaccinated against rabies, these exposures typically come from wild animals, including:

  • raccoons
  • skunks
  • foxes
  • coyotes
  • bats

While any mammal can be susceptible to rabies, small mammals, including squirrels, rats, mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, gerbils, chipmunks, rabbits, and hares, rarely get rabies and aren’t usually thought to be a risk for humans.

Your other pets, including dogs, cats, and ferrets, are though. They should be vaccinated against rabies. As should other domestic animals, including cows, goats, sheep, and horses.

To avoid rabies, teach your kids to avoid wild animals.
To avoid rabies, teach your kids to avoid wild animals. Photo by Emilie Chen (CC BY-ND 2.0)

It is also important to teach your kids to avoid wild animals. While most kids won’t go out of their way to pet a coyote, they might try to feed a racoon or skunk, and they might pick up a bat they find on the ground.

Kids should also avoid cats and dogs that they don’t know. Your kids should not just walk up and pet unfamiliar dogs and cats.

What to Do If Your Child Is Exposed to Rabies

Unfortunately, you won’t always know if an animal has rabies, although an animal acting strangely can be a tip off that they might have rabies.

Never touch a bat that you find on the ground during the day, as it might have rabies.
Never touch a bat that you find on the ground during the day, as it might have rabies. Photo by Radu Privantu (CC BY 2.0)

That bat your kids found on the ground could definitely have rabies, especially if they found it during the day. And the bat doesn’t even have to obviously bite your child. For example, if you find a sick or dead bat in your child’s room in the morning when he wakes up, you should consider that a possible exposure to rabies.

Many other exposures happen when kids are bitten by stray cats or dogs.

What do you do?

According to the CDC, if your child is bitten by any animal or has any possible exposure to rabies, you should:

  • immediately wash the wound well with soap and water, also using a povidone-iodine solution (Betadine Antiseptic Solution) to irrigate the wound if it is available
  • see a healthcare provider
  • call your local animal control for help in capturing the animal for observation or rabies testing

Animal control can also help in verifying a pet’s rabies vaccination status if your child was bitten by a neighborhood cat or dog.

“A healthy domestic dog, cat, or ferret that bites a person should be confined and observed for 10 days. Those that remain alive and healthy 10 days after a bite would not have been shedding rabies virus in their saliva and would not have been infectious at the time of the bite.”

CDC on Human Rabies Prevention — United States, 2008

In general, unless they already appear rabid, dogs, cats, and ferrets can be quarantined and observed for 10 days to see if they develop signs of rabies before your child begins post-exposure prophylaxis.

Other animals, including skunks, raccoons, foxes, coyotes, and bats should be considered rabid, with a quick start of post-exposure prophylaxis, unless the animal can be quickly tested (brain material) for rabies. And of course, you would be more considered about rabies if the animal was acting strangely, looked sick, or if it was an unprovoked attack.

What if you can’t find or capture the animal?

Depending on the circumstances, your pediatrician, with the help of your local or state health department, can determine if your child needs rabies post-exposure prophylaxis with rabies immune globulin and a 4 dose series of the rabies vaccine over 2 weeks.

“The number of rabies-related human deaths in the United States has declined from more than 100 annually at the turn of the century to one or two per year in the 1990’s. Modern day prophylaxis has proven nearly 100% successful.”

CDC on Rabies in the U.S.

About 40,000 to 50,000 people in the United States get rabies post-exposure prophylaxis each year. That works to keep the number of rabies cases and rabies deaths in people very low.

And it is not probably not at the top of your list of things to think about at a time like this, but animal bites can also be a risk for tetanus. Make sure your child doesn’t need a tetanus shot.

What to Know About Getting Exposed to Rabies

Keep your kids safe from rabies by vaccinating your pets and teaching them to avoid wild animals, but also know what to do if your child is exposed to rabies.

More on Getting Exposed to Rabies

A 6-year-old in Florida With Rabies Has Died

Never touch a bat that you find on the ground during the day, as it might have rabies.
Never touch a bat that you find in your home or on the ground during the day, as it might have rabies. Photo by Radu Privantu (CC BY 2.0)

As most people understand, rabies is a little different than most vaccine-preventable diseases.

Unlike other vaccines, you typically don’t get a rabies vaccine until after you are exposed to the rabies virus. That’s why the rabies vaccine isn’t on the routine childhood immunization schedule.

And that’s why we also try to routinely vaccinate all of the animals around us that might get rabies, especially our pets.

It’s also why it’s important to avoid animals that might have rabies, including unfamiliar cats and dogs, and wild animals, especially bats, raccoons, skunks, foxes, and coyotes.

A 6-year-old in Florida Has Rabies

Unfortunately, this strategy doesn’t always work.

A 6-year-old in Florida, Ryker Roque, was recently exposed to rabies when his father found a sick bat and placed it in a bucket on their porch. Little Ryker eventually put his hand in the bucket and was “scratched” by the bat, even though his father had warned him not to touch the bat.

Could someone search for advice on Google on treating a bite from a rabid animal and come away thinking their child doesn't need rabies shots from an anti-vaccine website?
Could someone search for advice on Google on treating a bite from a rabid animal and come away thinking their child doesn’t need rabies shots from an anti-vaccine website?

After searching for information on what to do if a child is bitten by a sick bat, Ryker’s parents decided to wash his hands with soap and hot water.

“If you think your pet has been bitten by a bat, contact a veterinarian or your health department for assistance immediately and have the bat tested for rabies.”

CDC on Coming in contact with bats

The Today Show reports that they didn’t take him for rabies shots, even though they “knew they should have,” because “Ryker cried at the thought of getting shots.”

In a more common scenario, or maybe what happened here, parents simply decide that the risk is low and they take their chances. This is even more common after a child is bitten by a stray cat or dog and you simply don’t have vaccination records or an animal to put in quarantine.

Experimental Treatments for Rabies

When traditional post-exposure prophylaxis isn’t used – human rabies immune globulin and a series of rabies shots to prevent someone from getting rabies, the disease is historically fatal. We have no good treatments for human rabies and rabies encephalitis.

“The poor prognosis in rabies may reflect the fact that infection induces immune unresponsiveness, characterized by impaired T-cell function, with altered cytokine patterns, inhibition of T-cell proliferation, and the destruction of immune cells.”

Alan C Jackson on Current and future approaches to the therapy of human rabies

Fortunately, some experimental treatments have been developed that can offer at least a little bit of hope when someone gets rabies, including:

  • The Milwaukee Protocol – developed for a 15-year-old girl in Wisconsin who developed rabies symptoms one month after picking up a bat that had fallen to the floor at church. The bat bit her as she carried it outside. As her symptoms progressed, she was put into a drug induced coma, put on a ventilator, and given antiviral medications. She eventually recovered with mild to moderate after-effects, but most others on the protocol do not recover at all.
  • use of rabies virus-neutralizing human monoclonal antibodies
  • new experimental vaccines

Tragically, reports about recovery from rabies and rabies encephalitis are rare.

Things that might point to a favorable outcome, in addition to being vaccinated, including being young and healthy, having mild symptoms when treatment is started, and being exposed to rabies from a bat, instead of a dog or other animal.

Unfortunately, like many others, Ryker died while on the protocol.

Anti-Vaccine Websites and Rabies Vaccines

Believe it or not, anti-vaccine websites even work to scare folks away from getting rabies vaccines after their kids are exposed to a rabid animal.

  • Age of Autism promotes a self published book about a child who “who regressed into autism following a series of rabies vaccines when he was three and a half”
  • The Healthy Home Economist claims that our pets are suffering from vaccinosis, that pet vaccines contain a toxic chemical cocktail, and that they are a scientific fraud.
  • GreenMedinfo published an article from Suzanne Humphries, MD warns that an ingredient in the rabies vaccine “could possibly throw children or adults onto dialysis and/or a kidney transplant”
  • Kelly Brogan, MD, in her “review article,” Psychobiology of Vaccination Effects: Bidirectional Relevance of Depression, continues to push the idea that the rabies vaccine can cause ADEM.

And of course, almost every anti-vaccine website and anti-vaccine expert pushes the idea that vaccines don’t work.

Get educated. While vaccines are always necessary, there are some situations when they are critically important.

What to Know About Bats and Rabies

Rabies is a vaccine-preventable disease, so be sure to seek quick medical attention if there is ever a possibility that your child was exposed to a rabid animal, whether it is a dog, cat, bat, raccoon, skunk, fox, or coyote.

More on Bats and Rabies

Updated January 15, 2018

Who is Joseph Meister

Most people know the big names in the history of vaccines.

They know that Edward Jenner developed the first smallpox vaccine (1798) and that both Jonas Salk (1955) and Albert Sabin (1960s) developed polio vaccines.

Many other important names are forgotten though.

Ever heard of James Phipps? He was the 8-year-old boy who was the first to become inoculated with cowpox by Jenner to see if it would protect him from smallpox.

Who is Joseph Meister

Edward Jenner didn’t go out of his way to experiment on Joseph Meister, but he has a similar story.

A plaque honors Joseph Meister and Louis Pasteur in the Alsace region of France.
A plaque honors Joseph Meister and Louis Pasteur in the Alsace region of France.

In 1885, Louis Pasteur had been working on an attenuated (weakened) rabies vaccine in his lab in Paris, but had still not tested it on any human patients yet.

One hot July morning in 1885, feverish little Joseph Meister was dragged by his frantic mother through the streets of Paris in search of an unknown scientist who, according to rumors, could prevent rabies. For nine-year-old Joseph had been bitten in 14 places by a huge, mad dog and in a desperate attempt to cheat death, his mother had fled from their home town in Alsace to Paris. Early in the afternoon Mme Meister met a young physician in a hospital. “You mean Pasteur,” he said. “I’ll take you there.”

Time magazine 1939

Supervised by two doctors, Dr. Alfred Vulpian and Dr. Jacques-Joseph Grancher, Joseph Meister received the first of 14 doses of Pasteur’s rabies vaccine on July 6, 1885, two days after he was bitten.

Joseph Meister survived and became the first person to be successfully vaccinated against rabies.

“As the death of this child appeared inevitable, I decided, not without deep and severe unease, as one can well imagine, to try on Joseph Meister the procedure which had consistently worked in dogs.”

Louis Pasteur

So at about the same time as anti-vaccine folks were marching in Leicester, Joseph Meister’s mother traveled over 400km to see a doctor she didn’t know, to get her son an experimental vaccine that had never even been used on a person before.

News of the Newark kids going to Paris to get Pasteur's rabies vaccine made the front page of the New York Times.
News of the Newark kids going to Paris to get Pasteur’s rabies vaccine made it into the New York Times.

Her son was lucky that she did.

It saved his life.

A few months later, a teenager named Jean-Baptiste Jupille was bitten by a rabid dog as he saved six other children that were being attacked. He became the second person to receive Pasteur’s rabies vaccine and he too lived.

Soon, Pasteur was a hero and many people were seeking his rabies vaccine from all over the world.

In December 1885, six boys from Newark, New Jersey were bitten by a rabid dog and there were calls to send them to Paris to be treated by Pasteur. Donations were collected and four of the boys ended up going on the steamship Canada to Paris.

While that trip to Paris generated some controversy, as some later doubted that the dog had rabies, there is no doubt that Pasteur’s rabies vaccine saved a lot of lives.

Few people survived having rabies in the pre-vaccine era.
Few people survived having rabies in the pre-vaccine era.

Why were folks in Newark, and apparently everywhere else, so afraid of rabies?

It had only been a few months earlier, about the time that Joseph Meister was being successfully vaccinated in Paris, that newspapers were reporting about “the terrible death” of a 5-year-old in Newark “after suffering the most intense agony.”

He had rabies.

Even if news of that case wasn’t fresh on their minds, it is easy to see that rabies wasn’t something you survived.

It should come as no surprise that there were soon rabies treatment clinics in major cities all over the world using Pasteur’s vaccine.

What to Know About Joseph Meister

At about the same time as anti-vaccine folks were marching in Leicester, Joseph Meister’s mother traveled over 400km to see a doctor she didn’t know, to get her son an experimental vaccine that had never been used on a person before – to save him from rabies.

More About Joseph Meister

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