Hundreds may have been exposed to rabies at bat-infested cabins in Grand Teton National Park
By SEJAL GOVINDARAO and MEAD GRUVER
Health officials are working to alert hundreds of people in dozens of states and several countries who may have been exposed to rabies in bat-infested cabins in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park over the past few months.
As of Friday, none of the bats found in some of the eight linked cabins at Jackson Lake Lodge had tested positive for rabies.
But the handful of dead bats found and sent to the Wyoming State Veterinary Laboratory in Laramie for testing were probably only a small sample of the likely dozens that colonized the attic above the row of cabins, Wyoming State Health Officer Dr. Alexia Harrist said.
Other bats weren’t killed but got shooed out through cabin doors and windows. Meanwhile, the vast majority never flapped down from the attic into living spaces.
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.