Comment by tzs
13 hours ago
Assuming you are starting with a wild raccoon, get one from a population that is not in the eastern parts of the US or Canada and rabies is unlikely.
Here in Washington state for example there have been no documented cases of rabies in any wild raccoon in at least 60 years. Same goes for all other wild terrestrial mammals here.
Or, use extreme caution in handling the animal in the first few days.
Rabies is neither subtle, nor slow.
Bats, on the other hand...
Plus, there are vaccines to prevent it.
If you were talking about the rabies vaccine, for humans, that’s not really a normal vaccine for people to get. It’s not like getting the flu vaccine or the chickenpox vaccine or others, and they shouldn’t be lumped into that same category.
How is it not?
I'm currently 1 of 3 injections into getting a rabies vaccine and it's basically like every other vaccine I've had. A simple, painless, injection in the arm.
I got it the same time as my first shot of the Hep B vaccine too.
2 replies →
Yes, but the rabies vaccine is not really for "prevention" (with some exceptions, before someone comes "ackschually" here), more like post-exposure
Because it sucks less than dying of Rabies and boy you don't want to know how low the bar is here
It's expensive but it isn't particularly bad to get.
I had a pretty low risk exposure to a bat this summer and decided to get it because it's so hard to be sure they didn't bite you. Wasn't a big deal, and I got quite a lot of the antibody injections in my finger...
Yes, I read an account by a zookeeper who had been potentially exposed to rabies due to the negligence of a vet. He had to get the rabies vaccine to be safe, which would have been painful enough if all had done well; but then he had a bad reaction to it and had to be hospitalized.