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Rabid Vampire Bats
07 August 2014

Rabid Vampire Bats

This isn’t your reflection, but a common vampire bat. Here, you can see the bat’s incisors used to nick the skin of its prey, while anticoagulants in the saliva prevent clotting so it can lap up the free-flowing blood. But herein lies a bigger danger: rabies is transmitted via the saliva. Despite recent efforts to increase education, vaccination and bat population control throughout the Amazon basin, outbreaks of vampire bat-transmitted rabies have escalated. Affected communities are generally remote villages with limited access to vaccines and healthcare. Often they hold fast to traditional beliefs, attributing the disease to witchcraft, and are suspicious of vaccinations. Scientists now say that sustained human vaccination efforts are infeasible and new approaches are needed. They suggest taking advantage of grooming behaviour by introducing oral vaccine into the fur of captured bats, and giving vaccines to livestock populations so that bats will inoculate themselves as they feed.

Written by Nick Kennedy

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BPoD stands for Biomedical Picture of the Day. Managed by the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences until Jul 2023, it is now run independently by a dedicated team of scientists and writers. The website aims to engage everyone, young and old, in the wonders of biology, and its influence on medicine. The ever-growing archive of more than 4000 research images documents over a decade of progress. Explore the collection and see what you discover. Images are kindly provided for inclusion on this website through the generosity of scientists across the globe.

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