A local courier is warning South Nelson residents about a bat that scratched him last week — which he worries could be rabid.
Bradley Saint John was making a delivery around 3 p.m. Monday on South Sheppard Drive when the encounter happened.
“It was flying beside me about head height, a foot away from arm’s reach, as I was walking down a driveway,” the Robson resident says.
“When I first looked at it, I thought it was a hummingbird. I kept walking and it kept fluttering beside me. I thought that’s really odd.”
He stopped to watch it, and it also stopped, then fluttered down and landed on his inner thigh. “When it stopped flying, its wings were folding in, and that’s when I saw it was a bat,” Saint John says. “My immediate response was get off of me!”
He struck it, it landed on the ground, and then flew away.
Although he initially shrugged the incident off, soon afterward he mentioned it to someone who told him he ought to be careful.
“When I smacked it, I felt the cold of the skin. I kept feeling that at the point of contact on my finger,” Saint John says. “It was probably psychosomatic, but where I could still feel it, I saw a scratch, a quarter of an inch long. It hardly broke the skin.”
Saint John went to Kootenay Lake Hospital but says he wasn’t taken seriously — staff wanted to take his blood pressure, while he insisted the scratch should be scrubbed, washed, and treated.
He instead went to the drop-in clinic in the Chahko-Mika Mall, where his wound received more urgent attention. He says they contacted Interior Health, and he was given the first in a series of anti-rabies injections.
Saint John says the biggest tipoff the bat might have been rabid was that it was flying in the daytime — abnormal behaviour.
Jennifer Jeyes, a communicable disease specialist with Interior Health, says there is no way of telling whether a bat is rabid just by looking at it, “which is why we assess any bat contact and take it seriously.”
She says between four and eight per cent of bats that come in contact with people will test positive for rabies. Scratches or bites should be washed thoroughly with soap and water, and anyone who has a close encounter should report it to public health or speak to their doctor immediately.
In 2009, just under 150 people were treated in B.C. for potential exposure to rabies — not all from bats, although they are the primary carrier of the virus.
The risk of encounters is higher in the summer, Jeyes says, with cabins a popular place for them to hang out.
She adds she doesn’t want to give the flying mammals a bad rap: “Bats are an important part of the ecosystem and we want to keep them around. It’s just a matter of taking precautions to avoid coming in contact with them.”