The pediatric emergency room team at Rambam Medical Center treated one of the strangest incidents they have encountered recently over the weekend: a 15-year-old boy from the Haifa area came to the medical center for urgent examination after encountering a bat that had entered his home.
The boy, who heard strange noises coming from the air conditioner, approached the area to discover that a small bat had entered the house, hiding in it. While trying to free the flying mammal from the air conditioner, he felt the discharge from the bat fall onto his face and enter his mouth.
At the same time, the family cat, which also noticed the foreign invader, acted on its natural senses, jumped on the bat, and hunted it down.
The boy, who understood the danger of the chain of events, came for further investigation at the children's screening center at Rambam.
""According to the Ministry of Health guidelines, any contact of any kind with a bat requires that the case be treated very seriously," explains Riad Sheikh, a nurse in charge of the pediatric emergency room at Rambam who accompanied the case. "In such cases, one should go to the emergency room or the health bureau to receive preventive treatment for rabies," he explains, emphasizing, "A bat is considered an immediate suspect for carrying the disease, even if there was no direct contact or no visible injury. You don't take risks. After receiving the preventive treatment, and the recommendation to treat the family cat in a similar manner, the boy was released home when he felt better.".
