“It really was a darling little thing,” recalls Rita. “Our maintenance man found it lying on its back on one of our window ledges, squawking.” Rita doesn’t get to see too many bats where she works–on North Southport near Fullerton. So the encounter, about a month ago, made this particular Monday morning special.
It was a routine precaution that in this case had a less-than-routine result. The test for rabies was made at a city lab in the Loop on Tuesday. By Wednesday the results had been forwarded to the Western Avenue office of Peter Poholik, director of the city of Chicago’s Animal Care and Control Commission, who passed on the word to his staff: “We got a confirmed case of rabies in the bat.”
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The chain of transmission has been understood for decades, and it was decades ago that the state passed a rabies-control law, administered by each county. Like most sizable municipalities, Chicago runs its own program, but it must also conform to the protocols and procedures set by Cook County. Pets are required to be inoculated against rabies. Stray dogs and cats are impounded for ten days–long enough for symptoms to appear in an infected animal–before disposal. Captured wild animals that have bitten someone or even come into close contact with people are routinely killed so that their brains can be tested for rabies. Two local rabies labs–one run by the state public health department, the other run by the city–together conduct such tests on roughly 1,800 animals each year.
As noted, any warm-blooded animal, from a polecat to a preschooler, can transmit the virus to humans. Dogs, however, are by far the most common source because of their close association with people. The last case in Chicago of confirmed human exposure to a sick bat was in 1983, when three rabid bats were collected from a playground near Cabrini-Green.
Nor are bats a reservoir for the rabies virus that infects such wild animals as skunks, says Gene Gardner, a wildlife researcher at the Illinois Natural History Survey in Urbana. Rabies viruses are of two types. The “mad” or “excited” strain produces the grim symptoms commonly associated with the disease–irritability that in its more aggravated stages approaches viciousness, and the spastic contractions of the throat muscles typical of the disease. There is also a paralytic or “dumb” strain of the rabies virus. That strain does not cause “mad dog” aggression but a debilitation so general that the afflicted animal cannot even move, much less attack. It is this paralytic strain that is usually found in bats.
It’s likely that even rabid bats pose only marginal dangers to a sensible human, although staff members at Cook County’s animal-control unit concede they have no idea how much of a problem bats are when it comes to rabies. Not only do bats stay away from people as a rule, but most people, revulsed or afraid, stay away from bats. The problem is with kids. Poholik remembers with a shiver that when his crew showed up to collect those three rabid bats at the Cabrini-Green playground in 1983, some boys had picked up the animals and were chasing frightened girls with them. It is as unusual for an unprovoked bat to bite a human as it is for a human to bite a bus, but a bat, healthy or ill, will bite when it is carelessly handled.
Generally, bats’ preferences in residential real estate do not match those of the city’s humans. Pond says that there aren’t a lot of bats on the Gold Coast, for example, in spite of the many roosting sites provided by its venerable apartment buildings. (Those buildings have lots of nooks and crannies, as well as crooks and nannies; a half-inch crack is a condo to a bat.) Bat fanciers who have searched for them using ultrasonic sound detectors, which pick up their high-frequency echolocation signals, report that bats also are scarce in the bungalow belt of the northwest side.
