Each year, an estimated 55,000 Americans receive prophylactic rabies shots due to animal bites. Studies say many are unnecessary.
Gustav Cappaert is a physician assistant based in Black Mountain, North Carolina. This op-ed originally featured onRabies is a terrifying disease. Once the virus enters a human host—typically by way of a bite from an infected animal—it creeps along from nerve cell to nerve cell until it reaches the brain. It usually takes a month or more for symptoms to show.
As with many public health issues, the question is best understood in terms of costs and benefits. In the US, the costs of rabies treatments are unnecessarily high, which may prevent lifesaving help from getting to the people who need it most. At the same time, the benefits of an individual treatment are difficult to estimate, so hasty decisions driven by fear of a deadly disease often result in PEP being recommended to the wrong patients.
It’s worth noting that rabies is extremely rare in the US. Thanks mostly to strides in pet vaccination, there were justacquired within US borders between 2009 and 2018. Since the canine-specific variant was eradicated in 2004, the remaining virus survives mainly in the wild, carried predominantly by bats, raccoons, and skunks.
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