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All about rabies - a funny hospital story!

Ed the Editor's personal blog corner

Imagine you come back from a holiday in India and a couple of days later you feel ill enough to go to the Emergency room at your local hospital. The doctors check you out, looking for clues about your condition. They ask what you have been doing recently, presumably as a way of homing in on something out of the ordinary that may be the possible cause of your illness.

After a long think, you say you were bitten by a dog in Bombay the week before.

I am no medical expert, but I would have considered a few options. At the very least, even forgetting the dog part of the story, maybe I would have investigated to see if the person was suffering from early symptoms of Bombay Bum, a tricky ailment that once developed, leaves you stranded without warning, with brown undies, every 23 minutes. But no, there was no swab or internal investigation. They checked for things like sun stroke, dehydration, silly things that she obviously wasn't suffering from.

And that was it, the consultation was over. She was invited to come back if she felt any worse.

The details of this hospital visit were revealed in the papers a few days later, when we also learned that the poor woman had been readmitted in her death throes, riddled with rabies, almost beyond help. The ironic thing is, if she had stayed in India, she would have probably been treated much earlier on for rabies, seeing as they are somewhat alert to the repercussion of stray dog bites.

Perhaps if she had said that a flock of bats had nipped her, or a fox had attacked her, or she had inhaled the fumes from the faeces of a rabid skunk, or had been fraternising with unvaccinated raccoons, perhaps the doctors at home would have been more interested?

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