Ontario health authorities confirmed a person was infected by rabies, the first human case identified in the province since 1967.
The Brant County Health Unit (BCHU) said in a news release Friday that it “has received confirmation of a human case of rabies in a resident of Brantford-Brant,” about 40 km west of Hamilton.
The suspected exposure was from a bat and occurred in the Gowganda area of the Timiskaming region, in northeastern Ontario, the release says. The infected individual is hospitalized.
“Rabies cases in humans are rare,” BCHU said in the release. “Ontario’s last domestic case of human rabies occurred in 1967. There have been 26 human cases in Canada since 1924.”
Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist and associate professor at the University of Toronto, agreed. “Locally acquired rabies is exceedingly rare in Canada,” he said, but cases have also emerged from travellers who got it elsewhere and came back.
“It’s about 60,000 deaths per year globally, and it’s much more common in South Asians and African settings,” Dr. Bogoch said. “The virus is present in every continent in the world, except for Antarctica.”
Rabies can infect any mammal and spread through bites or other contact with the saliva of infected animals in wounds or the eyes, nose or mouth.
Effective preventive and post-exposure treatments exist, but the rabies virus is almost always fatal once symptoms begin. People who have been in direct contact with bats, raccoons, or skunks, or have been bitten by a dog in a foreign country, for example, should seek immediate medical attention, Dr. Bogoch said.
Symptoms can take days and up to weeks or months to appear. They include numbness and itchiness around the site of a bite, fever, headache, muscle spasms, difficulty breathing, and fear of water and air gusts.
In 2023, there were 56 cases of rabies identified in Ontario, including 49 bats, six skunks, and one domestic cat. Bat cases were found throughout the province.
Dr. David Fisman, a physician epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, said in an e-mail that bats are “the most important reservoir for rabies in terms of human risk in North America.”
One reason why human cases are so rare in Canada, Dr. Fisman said, is because we vaccinate domestic animals, thus creating “a ‘buffer’ that protects us against whatever is happening in wild animals.
Researchers have found that vaccinating domestic animals, such as stray dogs in India, where 20,000 rabies deaths occur annually, “could very cost-effectively reduce human rabies deaths.”
Pet owners in Ontario are required by law to make sure their pets are up to date on their rabies vaccinations. The province also uses oral vaccine baits to treat raccoons in the wild but says “there is no efficient way to vaccinate bats against rabies.”