Health officials are currently engaged in a significant effort to alert hundreds of people across dozens of US states and several countries, following potential exposure to rabies from bats in cabins at Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park over recent months.
The widespread alert stems from concerns over bat presence within eight linked cabins at Jackson Lake Lodge. Despite the extensive outreach, as of Friday, none of the bats recovered from these specific cabins and subsequently tested have returned positive results for rabies.
However, Dr. Alexia Harrist, Wyoming State Health Officer, has cautioned that the limited number of dead bats found and dispatched to the Wyoming State Veterinary Laboratory in Laramie for analysis likely represents "only a small sample of the likely dozens that colonized the attic above the row of cabins." She further explained that many other bats were not killed but were simply ushered out through cabin doors and windows, while the vast majority never descended from the attic into the living areas below.
Health officials thus deemed it better safe than sorry to alert everybody who has stayed in the cabins recently that they might have been exposed by being bitten or scratched. Especially when people are sleeping, a bat bite or scratch can go unseen and unnoticed.
“What we’re really concerned about is people who saw bats in their rooms and people who might have had direct contact with a bat,” Harrist said Friday.
The cabins have been unoccupied, with no plans to reopen, since concessionaire Grand Teton Lodge Company discovered the bat problem July 27.
Bats are a frequent vector of the rabies virus. Once symptoms occur — muscle aches, vomiting, itching, to name a few — rabies is almost always fatal in humans.
The good news is a five-shot prophylactic regimen over a two-week period soon after exposure is highly effective in preventing illness, Harrist noted.
The cabins opened for the summer season in May after being vacant over the winter. Based on the roughly 250 reservations through late July, health officials estimated that up to 500 people had stayed in the cabins.
They were trying to reach people in 38 states and seven countries through those states' health agencies and, in the case of foreign visitors, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Others who have not been alerted yet but stayed in cabins 516, 518, 520, 522, 524, 526, 528 and 530 this year should tell health officials or a doctor immediately, Harrist said.
Health officials were recommending prophylactic shots for people who fit certain criteria, such as deep sleepers who found a bat in their room, and children too young to say that they had seen a bat.
The Wyoming Department of Health had no ongoing concern about visitor safety at the Jackson Lake Lodge area. That includes a Federal Reserve economic policy symposium Aug. 21-23 that takes place at Jackson Lake Lodge every summer.
“The lodge company has done a fantastic job of doing their due diligence of making sure everyone that is coming in for that, and for all other visits this year, are going to be as safe as possible,” said Emily Curren, Wyoming’s public health veterinarian.
“Three or four” dead bats from the cabins tested negative and one that was mangled did not have enough brain tissue to be testable, Curren said.
All were brown bats, which come in two species: “little” and “big,” with the larger ones more than twice as big. Officials were unsure which species these were, but both are common in Wyoming.
They typically live in colonies of 30 to 100 individuals, Curren said.
“That’s a lot of bats that we cannot rule out a risk of rabies being in,” Curren said. “There’s no way for us to know for certain about every single bat that got into these rooms.”
There are no plans to exterminate the bats, Grand Teton National Park spokesperson Emily Davis said. Devices fitted to the building were keeping the bats from getting back in after flying out in pursuit of insects to eat, they said.
