<p>This is just.... ewwww!!!</p>
<p>Aw, bats are cute.</p>
<p>Had one once flying around in my living room. the only problem was it kept flying through the ceiling fan which was on. I expected red to be flying everywhere, but that did not happen. </p>
<p>Finally, I shut off all the lights in the house, turned the porch light on, and the bat followed the light out the door.</p>
<p>Then I went to sleep.</p>
<p>Yeah, H saw this and said he felt sorry for the bats. To wake up and find a bat in your bed? NO thank you!!! Glad to hear you didn't have minced bat in your living room.</p>
<p>Bats carry rabies. I wouldn't want them in my dorm or my house.</p>
<p>We get bats all the time in the house. My daughter caught one in her Barbie house when she was 10! Now that was gross! We had one we kept for a little while in a mesh box (tiny mesh - they can get out through a hole only 1/4 inch wide!). They are so soft to touch - but ugly.</p>
<p>Now, Spot, our Jack Russell terrier alerts us when we have visitors. We whack 'em with a tennis racket (doesn't hurt them and they don't "hear" it coming), then pop 'em outside. </p>
<p>Interestingly, they LOVE my husband's hair and he has awakened several times to their padding around on his head. NO THANKS! That's beyond my tolerance for flying mice.</p>
<p>Bats are capable of carrying rabies. Some do. Most don't. But they do eat lots and lots of insects.</p>
<p>Still, I have to agree that I wouldn't want to wake up next to one.</p>
<p>If you've had lots of bats in your attic, you are also a prime risk for a nice case of histoplasmosis. If I saw bats around the inside of my house I'd have an exterminator out here this week. (As long as they stay outside I'm a big Batfan.)</p>
<p>WashDad, there was something on the local news a couple of months ago about a kid who woke up with a bat in his room (it flew in through an open window). He had to undergo a series of shots, because he might have been bitten by it, and in our state, bats are highly infected with rabies. I like to watch them from a distance, but would never touch one - they bite and scratch.</p>
<p>I love bats - indeed I love all nature. We go kayaking in the evening sometimes in the Adirondacks amd when we are coming back down the stream it can be like we are in a wind tunnel of bats. That's cool.</p>
<p>BUT having a bat in a room while you are sleeping is not good. You could in fact be scratched or bit by a rabid bat. Rabies is something you just don't want to fool around with! </p>
<p>If you frequently find bats in your house you need to find out how they are getting in and plug the hole. Do it in the winter while they are gone.</p>
<p>We had bats in between the slatted vents at the roofline of our attic. They had babies and would not leave. In the winter when they left we had a guy climb up and spay some sort of foam adhesive stuff between the slats. We later heard that our close neighbors had bats the following spring. Guess they just go from one house to the next.</p>
<p>Rabies is fatal. In all of recorded history there has been only one case of a man surviving an untreated rabies infection. While I appreciate bats in the wild, if you ever have one in your house, you need to undergo a rabies vaccination series. Their bites are so mild that you would be unaware you had been bitten. While the series is painful, and includes several gamma globulin injections at the first visit followed by rabies vaccines given over a month, it is a necssary precaution. I can't imagine the school would not provide the shots for these kids.</p>
<p>Foam adhesive will mean your attic won't vent the way it's intended to. Wire mesh would have been a better choice.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Rabies is fatal. In all of recorded history there has been only one case of a man surviving an untreated rabies infection. While I appreciate bats in the wild, if you ever have one in your house, you need to undergo a rabies vaccination series. Their bites are so mild that you would be unaware you had been bitten. While the series is painful, and includes several gamma globulin injections at the first visit followed by rabies vaccines given over a month, it is a necssary precaution. I can't imagine the school would not provide the shots for these kids.
[/quote]
Yup. Before I started working at an animal hospital, I had to undergo extensive training, including rabies prevention. Except for skunks in certain part of the US, bats are the primary carriers of rabies.</p>
<p>What bothered me was "one week after the bats moved in, the school moved out." Why did it take them that long? </p>
<p>There is one girl who survived rabies, but she did receive treatment- of a sort.
<a href="http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5350a1.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5350a1.htm</a></p>
<p>Bats ARE cool. Outdoors.</p>
<p>~mafool (who lives in an older home that has had its share of "guests" over the years.)</p>
<p>A lot of Olde Ffolke have seen the old rabies injection series on movies or television -- a dozen or so big, painful injections into the abdomen. One of the boys in our Scout troop picked up a bat, handled it, and then set it down. It then flew away. Since most bat bites are so tiny they are hard to see, the camp medic referred him to a hospital, where the ER staff said all bat contact should be treated like rabies. The latest rabies injections are not into the abdomen, and the Scout said they were no big deal. I believe he had six injections over the course of a month. He was, of course, the Scoutmaster's son, and, no, I wasn't the Scoutmaster.</p>
<p>awww...bats are good skeeter-eaters! </p>
<p>Seriously, those kids should not have been engaging those bats in anyway and should have been quickly evacuated from the vicinity. Where were the durned RAs? We recently had a young man in our area die of rabies. He discovered a bat had entered his bedroom through an open window and shoo'd it out. He did not recall being bitten, but did say the bat lightly brushed up against him at one point. Weeks later he was on his deathbed. </p>
<p>SOP is any contact with a bat and you do the rabies regimen.</p>
<p>(Btw...we have bats in our palm trees...you can hear them 'squeaking' at night. I make sure the chihuahua is vaccinated, but am more worried about that hawk that likes to make passes at her when she takes bathroom breaks than I am the bats.)</p>
<p>The gamma globulin shots are the painful ones. If there is no known bite, the shots are distributed over fatty areas of the body. If a bite is present, most of the shots are given at the bite location. The number of shots depends on weight. Along with the gamma shots, a vaccine series is started, usually in the deltoid. </p>
<p>I just got back from the ER with my son. He's underging rabies shots because some %#@*&%@ dog owner took his yappy dog to a church festival. The dog lunged at my son from behind (unprovoked) and took a chomp out of his right thigh. The owner said "sorry" and fled!!!! EMTs on the scene cleaned the bite (glad it wasn't a pit bull,) but the cops could not locate dog & owner. Son needed seven gamma globulin shots -- five at the bite site and one in each buttock. They were long & painful, because the serum is thick. Today was just a vaccine. Three more ER visits to go. All because of a selfish, irresponsible dog owner.</p>
<p>We had bats get in our bedroom 2 nights in a row. Found out later it was due to an ill-fitting window. The first night, DH trapped it in a laundry basket, put a board underneath the basket and threw everything out the window. The second night, same story. This time we called the police (don't know what they would have done!) When the cops got there, and opened our bedroom door, there was our cat, with the bat underneath him, dead. The cat ended up getting the rabies shots. We got new windows. (The cops took the bat away with them!)</p>
<p>Go, cat! We got a flyer for a pest control company warning that with cold weather coming, mice would be moving indoors. Not in our house! Our cat is a Hunter with a capital H. She brings us "gifts" and leaves them on the back door welcome mat. If we don't get rid of them fast enough, she eats them.</p>
<p>If I had bats in the house I'd be worried about rabies AND any diseases that can come from their droppings.</p>
<p>StickerShock: Oh that is a bad story! I'm sorry that happened! :(</p>