My rabies-tastic week

Some of you may have seen my Facebook post from last week and I’m sorry if any of you thought I’d had my arm chewed off by a maniacal mutt. What actually happened was that one of the puppies had been acting weirdly in quarantine kennel 4. It had bitten 3 people in two days, then started chewing the wire of the cage, biting bricks and snapping at imaginary flies...and then it went off its food and water, which is when we started to panic because it was generally pretty greedy!

So, although we were really hoping, praying, delivering offerings to the gods that it was just a bit bored and in need of some TLC from a loving new family, we couldn’t really take the risk that it may have had rabies since it had chomped into the legs of three people already. Plus the rest of the staff, including me had also been exposed because we had been feeding and playing with it, and so had been licked.

I’ve learnt a lot about rabies in the past week. The virus is carried in the saliva of an infected animal and can be transmitted through a bite or a lick, which would deposit the virus into the bloodstream either through the bite wound or possibly through an open cut or graze.

It can take up to 7 years (WTF?) for the symptoms to show in a humans and once it’s in your system, it’s usually fatal with NO CURE. Only one recorded case exists of a human surviving rabies without treatment, though I have been told of others here in Malawi and I’m sure that there are some lucky (unrecorded) people across Africa who have faced down rabies and lived to tell the tale. Others have survived with treatment but only very rarely.

Unfortunately, the more we read about it, the more we realised that the puppy was a massive risk to everyone who had been in contact with her and so we asked our stand in vet, Rob (with a 35% kill rate) to put her down (RIP little bitch) and then sent her and her brain over to the vet labs for testing.

Jutta got to see the way that the brain was extracted from the puppy but unfortunately I was tied up with other things on Wednesday. But I did see the photos…and while the procedure is full-on gory, it’s amazing to see what they do, which is essentially slice the head open the whole way from the base of the neck to the tip of the nose, and then pull out this tiny little puppy brain, which is popped into a plastic bag and stuck in the fridge.

I was with them on Thursday though to see how they tested the brain. First they create a smear test with parts of the brain stem and gooey bits of grey matter, then they do some other fancy stuff to it, including injecting a special dye into the sample, which reacts with the virus to make it glow if the material is infected.

When we looked into the microscope to see if the test was positive, unfortunately for us, it was like looking at the stars. There was so much rabid activity going on in that little slide that it could have shrivelled up and eaten itself.

Although the first reaction was to leave the lab and chuck up into a quiet dark corner, I think Jutta and I held it together well enough, considering that we had to destroy another puppy, thereby pushing Rob's kill rate up to 40%. We also had to stick some of the others back into quarantine and sort out post-exposure jabs for us and the rest of the staff. Considering what we had just read and heard about rabies it's fair to say that we were bricking it. Seriously....brrrrricking it...

Two weeks on and plenty of beers later and all is OK. I’m actually really glad to have had the experience and to have learnt a bit more about rabies, which is one of those random diseases that you hear about but never really know much about if you're lucky enough to live in a rabies-free country like the UK or Australia. The yanks have it though, racoons are offending animal of choice apparently.

So anyway, despite my arms having more needle holes than a pin cushion, a wee word of warning for the future. Stay away if I start foaming at the mouth and eating bricks between now and 2020.

x