12,000 Chinese Blood Treatments Found To Be Contaminated With HIV

a reply to: FredT

If the area had a high population of some sort of animal that they either would not or could not control and rabies got into that population and toddlers were most at risk of exposure?

Say ... rats? Rats are known to bite children although I think rats usually become incapacitated with rabies fairly quickly. Still ... That gives you the shudders thinking about it.

a reply to: ketsuko

You guys are killing me, I had to look up rats as well. According to the CDC small rodents do not carry rabies.

As you postulate perhaps they are covering all basis but you would go after say school age children and adults first not toddlers in that scenario but then again I have a huge gap when it comes to Communist China's public health system

originally posted by: FredT
a reply to: ketsuko

You guys are killing me, I had to look up rats as well. According to the CDC small rodents do not carry rabies.

As you postulate perhaps they are covering all basis but you would go after say school age children and adults first not toddlers in that scenario but then again I have a huge gap when it comes to Communist China's public health system

Any animal can get rabies. I brought it up because my husband worked at the state rabies testing lab and they also researched the disease. One of the researchers there was involved in trying to develop a vaccine for ferrets at the time. One of my husband's unhappy duties was to infect cages of mice with the virus and then go back and harvest their brains after a window of time for that research.

They needed live virus to work with.

So rodents do get rabies. The thing is that the virus incapacitates them quickly, so it wouldn't spread readily.

I only suggested it as a possibility. It would take a severe overpopulation.

a reply to: ketsuko

www.cdc.gov...