User talk:Chamstar

Rabies
The UK is officially considered rabies free. This quote from the HPA:

The UK eliminated rabies from its terrestrial animal population early in the 20th century. It maintains this by requiring immunisation in vulnerable animals coming into the country and applying quarantine laws to unimmunised animals. Further questions about this should be directed to the Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), which regulates quarantine legislation ( http://www.defra.gov.uk/ ).

Humans generally catch rabies through being bitten by an infected animal (usually a dog). In this country, rabies has long been eliminated in the animal population, so recent human cases in the UK have all been associated with exposure to infected animals elsewhere in the world. There are no documented cases of human-to-human spread, except by the artificial route of organ transplantation. In a corneal transplant a part of the cornea is surgically removed after death and grafted into the eye of another person. Once the rabies risk from this was recognised, screening protocols were introduced and there have been no reports of rabies transmission by corneal transplant for over 15 years. In 2004, for the first time cases resulted from transplantation of solid organs from a donor in the United States, later discovered to have rabies. Later in the same year a similar incident occurred in Germany, where the donor had probably been infected while travelling in India ( CDR Weekly 3 March 2005 ).

Human rabies is extremely rare in the UK. The last case of classical rabies acquired in this country was more than a century ago, in 1902. Cases occurring since then have all been acquired abroad, usually through dog bites. In 2002 a man who was a licensed bat handler died in Scotland from infection with European Bat Lyssavirus 2, a rabies-like virus. This does not alter the status of the UK as rabies-free. On rare occasions someone who is incubating rabies arrives in this country and then falls ill with the disease.

Regards LittleOldMe (talk) 19:57, 13 February 2010 (UTC)