A shot in the arm
The latest anti-rabies shots are greatly improved with little to no discomfort
This month marks the 128th anniversary of the first person ever to be vaccinated against hydrophobia (or rabies).
On July 6, 1885, the great Louis Pasteur, using a vaccine he developed from rabbits, vaccinated nine-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been severely bitten by a rabid dog.
The kid survived, paving the way for developments in the vaccine that would save people all over the world, as well as countless dogs and cats.
`How far science has come since Pasteur’s first injection! My vet remembers that scarcely 30 years ago, when the vaccine was finally available in Thailand, she was bitten by a rabid dog in her clinic.
She seldom complains about discomfort, but she says that those injections into her abdomen were about the most painful she has ever experienced, and the itching, which followed the final injection, was equally uncomfortable.
Even 10 years ago, friends tell me, a new anti-rabies vaccine, developed to be injected into your arm, was also extremely painful.
Well, I’ve just completed my own anti-rabies course, and, believe me, with the latest developments, the injections don’t hurt at all, except for a very slight sting as the serum enters your body.
To find out if Hi-So, the little department-store cat who bit me, really had rabies, we sent her body off to the Red Cross. (The BMA office at Din Daeng also offers this service.)
Since virus antibodies can generally be found within a week or so in saliva, they did a quick check and within hours were able to tell us that no antibodies were found. This test is not 100-per-cent accurate, though, and now they’re checking the cat’s brain for signs of the virus. Those results will take 20 days.
I’m not too concerned. I’ve had those shots, and, equally important, as soon as I was bitten, I squeezed the wounds so that blood would come out. Inside your body, the rabies virus can kill you, but outside, it’s very fragile, dying very easily.
In addition, I wanted to run water over the wounds, but the department store’s nurse is a firm believer in betadine. Never mind. At the hospital, the nurses cleaned my wounds again.
Even so, I wasn’t safe. You can’t be too careful about animal bites. The hospital cleaned the wounds every day, but they still became infected. Cats especially carry extremely troublesome bacteria in their saliva, and you can suffer some very bad infections if you’re not careful.
Because rabies is so common in Thailand, vets recommend that you have your animals vaccinated once a year, instead of every three years, as is done in other countries.
For sure, Hi-So was never vaccinated, not against rabies nor against the feline leukaemia that probably killed her. Not even the great Pasteur could have saved her.
