If you have recently been bitten by a dog and you suspect you may have rabies, you must act quickly. To begin with, it will be essential to know the typical manifestations of the disease, but despite this, in its early stages there are no obvious symptoms.
Today, rabid dogs rarely exist, although it is not impossible for them to happen under certain circumstances. Rabies is common among bats, raccoons, squirrels, and a variety of other wild mammals that populate every corner of the globe, except Australia.
To find out how to react to any rabid animal bite, you should read this article on our site so you know what to do if a person is bitten by a rabid dog.
What is rabies?
It is an acute viral and infectious zoonotic disease. Transmitted through the saliva and secretions of infected animals or individuals. It is fatal in 99.9% of cases when the symptoms are patent, but cases have recently been achieved among infected people, who have been induced into artificial comas and have been cured (7 recent registered cases).
Manifestations of rabies in a dog
Hydrophobia as an alarm signal
Rabies is also known as hydrophobia (water phobia). This reaction is a definitive symptom to qualify a person or animal as suffering from the disease. The horror of water is so evident that beings attacked by this infection foam at the mouth because they are unable to swallow their own saliva.
The World He alth Organization (WHO) estimates that each year die in the world about65,000 people infected with rabies Asia accounts for 60% of rabies cases, as less than 10% of dogs are given the rabies vaccine.
Rabies through food
In many Asian countries, such as China or Vietnam, consuming dogs and cats as food is an ancestral culinary tradition, as occurs in the Yulin, the dog meat festival. For this reason, it is not an uncommon circumstance to contract rabies by cooking animals infected with the Rhabdoviridae, which causes the disease. Eating them is no longer so dangerous because cooking or roasting has managed to destroy the virus, but handling infected carcasses is very dangerous
The cultural food tradition, or going hungry in an impoverished society, explains the fact of this sad consumption. But what puzzles me is that in Western countries without these traditions and where hunger can be alleviated enough by going to social services, there are people who dedicate themselves to feeding themselves with all sorts of run-over animals. Families with children who are dedicated to traveling roads with motorhomes and collecting the carcasses of dogs, badgers, owls, etc., that they find in their path to feed. These are "ultra-ecologist and recycling" philosophies, which consider that feeding in this way is a way of not wasting anything and giving a positive meaning to the accidental death of the animal. However, I consider that going round and round the roads, looking for dead animals, and spending an amount of fuel that pollutes the air, is not excessively ecological. It is better to give children a good plate of lentils or chick peas than a spoiled badger burger.
What to do if we suspect a dog has rabies
When an adult is bitten by a stray dog, they should report it to their town hallimmediately, so that the control squad animal try to catch the dog and study it for 10 days. This management must be carried out by the parents if the person attacked is a minor. It is important to avoid contactwith a dog if we suspect that he suffers from rabies, so if we can confine him in a closed space where he cannot escape, the better.
It is very important to proceed without delay, because if after the study it turns out that the dog is not a carrier of rabies, after a cure and a simple injection of immunoglobulin the problem will have been solved. If, on the other hand, the dog has rabies, it must be immediate sacrifice to avoid a very long and terrible agony for the poor animal, in addition to preventing it from infecting more animals and people.
Rabies Today
Today the treatment and prevention of rabies has greatly improved, but this disease is very far from being eradicated The reason is the bats. In these tiny winged mammals is the reserve of rabies, since many are latent carriers of the virus, and others suffer from the disease. To know if a bat has rabies we must look at three things:
- When they fly, they collide with each other.
- They go out during the day.
- They fall to the ground.
And it is when it falls to the ground that the bat is vulnerable and can be eaten by a dog, a cat, a raccoon or any other animal, thus contracting the disease.
Symptoms of rabies in a dog
When, after an incubation period between 3 and 8 weeks, the dog begins to show the symptoms of the disease, it does so in three different phases.
- Prodromal stage. There is a noticeable change in the dog's usual behavior. He becomes sullen, nervous, skittish and has a fever. This first phase lasts about 3 days, during which the dog is isolated.
- Furious stage. This second phase ranges from 1 to 7 days, generally. During this period the dog is very aggressive, with convulsions, attempts to bite anything, hyperactive, irritable, disoriented, and does not rest.
- Paralytic stage. Many dogs before reaching this third phase, die. Its symptoms are: Foam in the mouth, paralysis of the head and neck, respiratory failure.
Current Rabies Treatments
If a dog bites you and you cannot locate it for its pertinent study, or any other wild animal bites you: you must inevitably undergo a medical visitUrgent and a subsequent Rabies treatment You will have previously washed and disinfected the wound very well at home, covering it with gauze.
The doctor will treat the wound and prescribe the medical guideline to follow, since there are two or three different ways to prevent the disease. All of them are annoying, but nothing to do with the way the disease was treated years ago. Today the 4 or 5 injections necessary to alleviate the spread of rabies are given in the arm.
The most common guideline to follow is to inject HRIG (human anti-rabies immunoglobulin), and then follow a treatment consisting of 5 injections in the human diploid anti-rabies vaccine armTo be administered following the following schedule on treatment days 1, 3, 7, 14 and 28.
There are places where intradermal injections are used (between the muscle and the skin), whose results are satisfactory and the treatment is cheaper.
Prevent Rabies
The best method of fighting rabies is prevention For which the vaccination of our dog is mandatory. It is also very convenient for people who deal with animals on a daily basis to be injected with a preventive vaccine (veterinarians, trainers, laboratory personnel, animal shelter volunteers, etc.)
