We’re back with Old Scratch’s Halloween Science Fact Spectacular! Today, we have a fact about the animal commonly referred to as “Old Scratch’s pubic lice.” No, it’s not about pubic lice (those are typically called “Old Scratch’s tiny bedfellows), it’s about … bats! Sort of!
Did you know …
That you don’t actually turn into a vampire after you’re bitten by a bat? It’s true!
Despite the common misconception, bats do not carry vampirism. Vampires carry vampirism, and sometimes you can get it if you step on a rusty nail or something, but bats don’t carry, and so can’t transmit, vampirism.
What you can get when you’re bitten by a bat is rabies! Not every bat carries rabies, but unless you’ve got the vision of an electron microscope, it’s best to treat every bat under the assumption that they’re rabid and either avoid them altogether, or pin them fatally to the floor with a tennis racquet.
If a bat somehow gets past your racquet and pierces your skin with its tiny teeth coated in virus laden saliva, I’m afraid that your prognosis isn’t great. Without immediate treatment (and, let’s be honest—if you can’t get to the dentist every six months, you’re definitely not going to make it in to the office for rabies shots), there’s an almost 100% chance that the disease will be fatal. At some point, as soon as several days after the infecting incident, you will begin to manifest symptoms. You will become agitated, paranoid, confused, or even hallucinatory. Your saliva glands will become hyperactive, but swallowing will be nearly impossible thanks to the painful spasms in your throat, and you will foam at the mouth, like the tiny bat that you tried to befriend before it bit you. Inside of two weeks, you will be frickin’ dead. Dead. You don’t come back from that, unless you’re a vampire, which, as we’ve already covered, you aren’t.
Your only slim chance is that your doctor is clever enough to administer the Milwaukee Protocol, an experimental technique that has cured a tiny handful of symptomatic rabies sufferers. Unfortunately, the Milwaukee Protocol requires that you be put into a medically-induced coma to slow the progress of the disease while you receive an extensive course of antiviral drugs. And, of course, when you come out of the coma (that is, if you come out of the coma), you will find that your brother and your girlfriend are doing it and that your English teacher and your mom are also totally doing it, or that your boyfriend and your spin class instructor are absolutely doing it and that your dog and your cat are doing it every chance they get. It would be a waking nightmare! You’d probably rather have died of an acute encephalitic infection!
Boooooooo!
No comments:
Post a Comment