Rabid bat adds fear to usual breakfast
A woman dining outside a St. Petersburg restaurant is required to get rabies shots after a bat tests positive for the disease.
By LISA GREENE
Published July 30, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - Cheryl Koski started out her Tuesday morning with her favorite breakfast: a biscuit, orange juice and Diet Coke at the Dome Grill on Central Avenue.
As Koski sat at one of the restaurant's sidewalk tables, she felt something crawling on her left ankle. She brushed it off. Then she looked to see what it was.
"It was like being hit by lightning," said Koski, 47, of St. Petersburg. "One minute, I'm eating breakfast, and the next, there's a bat crawling up my leg."
If that weren't creepy enough, the bat wasn't a run-of-the-mill critter.
Late Wednesday, a distinctive green glow under a laboratory microscope showed that it was the first bat in Pinellas County this year to test positive for rabies.
Koski, assistant professor of journalism at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, got three shots Thursday to ward off the fatal disease. She will have to receive four more over the next month.
At the restaurant Thursday, Nicolas Karamalakos, son of the owner, stressed that the bat was outside and not the restaurant's fault. The bat, he said, was just passing by.
"What do you want me to tell you?" he said. "I pass by. Bums pass by. ... He's not our little pet."
Karamalakos said restaurateurs haven't seen any other bats nearby. The state Department of Business and Professional Regulation inspected Tuesday and Wednesday without finding other bats or bat droppings, said press secretary Kristen Ploska.
It's not every day that a rabid animal shows up on a sidewalk in the heart of downtown, said Julia Gill, epidemiology program manager at the Pinellas County Health Department. But it can happen.
"This would be an unusual situation," Gill said. "However, these exposures can happen in rural or urban settings."
And bats can travel anywhere. They have their pluses: They eat mosquitoes, lowering everyone's risk of contracting West Nile Virus.
But they also can carry rabies. Bats are the animal that test positive most often for rabies at the state health department laboratory in Tampa, said Philip Amuso, lab director.
"If it looks like a bat, it's dangerous," Amuso said. "If you see a bat in the daytime, doing un-batly things, something's wrong."
That would include flopping around on the ground, as Koski's bat was.
The bat almost certainly belonged to a larger colony, said veterinarian Welch Agnew, assistant director of Pinellas County Animal Services. The colony might have been near the restaurant - or anywhere else, he said.
"There are bat colonies all over the place," he said. "It doesn't mean that in that particular colony, all the bats are rabid. There may be a rabid bat or two in each colony."
By late Thursday, Gill said, health department investigators had not found anyone else who came in direct contact with the bat. But she urged anyone who might have touched a bat in the Central Avenue area to call the health department.
There is no cure for rabies, a virus that infects a person's nervous system and ultimately kills. But the disease can be prevented, even after a person is exposed to the virus, with the shots that Koski is getting.
Koski didn't feel the bat bite her. But bat bites can be almost unnoticeable - so much so that people can be bitten in their sleep without awakening. And the virus is carried in animal saliva, so it's possible to contract it without being bitten.
Koski trapped the bat with a restaurant tray and called animal control. The whole episode led to a dispute between Koski and Karamalakos' father, who couldn't be reached Thursday, about what to do with the bat. But both Koski and Nicolas Karamalakos said it ended with Koski being told not to return to the restaurant - something she has no plans to do.
Because many wild animals carry rabies, it's not uncommon for people to get treated. In Pinellas this year, 21 people have received the shots. But most of the time, the shots are a precaution because the animal isn't captured. Three raccoons are the only other animals to test positive this year.
Captured animals go to the state lab for testing, a job not for the faint of heart. At times, Amuso said, suspect bats have escaped in the building, and scientists have had to chase them down. The tests call for removing the animal's brain, which means the scientists have had rabies shots themselves.
The Pinellas bat arrived already dead. Scientists treated its brain with a substance that reacts with the rabies virus. Then they put brain cells under a fluorescent microscope. A tell-tale glow - "kind of yellow green, like a green apple," Amuso said - meant bad news.
But by late Thursday, Koski had started to feel better.
"Today was the worst," she said of her shots. "Once I found out it had rabies, I wanted to get the ball rolling."