The General Hospital Doctor Aurelio Valdivieso in Oaxaca; where minors bitten by a bat were admitted.Carolina Jiménez (CUARTOSCURO)
The eight-year-old girl, who was bitten by a bat in the small Oaxacan community of Palo de Lima in early December, died Saturday, the state health service confirmed in a statement. The girl had been in the hospital in serious condition since December 24. The autopsy of his seven-year-old brother, who died December 29 and presented with the same symptoms, found his death was due to rabies.
Health services have indicated that “a group of multidisciplinary specialists” took care of the patient during her stay at the medical center. On December 27, three days after being hospitalized, authorities said the eight-year-old girl was being pronounced brain dead because she was not responding to stimuli. Rabies, experts consulted by this newspaper say, has a mortality rate of almost 100%, so early diagnosis can be key to counteracting its deadly effects.
Doctor Óscar Sosa, who specializes in epidemiology, says that the almost 100% lethality is explained by the complexity of detecting the disease. He reiterates that there are several ways to collect samples for analysis, but points out that most of these can be obtained when the patient is already in the hospital and therefore in a “serious” condition. “If I use a vaccine after an attack by an animal that may have rabies, I don’t need to take samples. But there is no way of knowing if it will properly prevent rabies in the person. The only way would be if the animal was diagnosed and the person had no effect after using the vaccine,” he explains.
A bat attack on December 1 in the modest rural community of Palo de Lima (100 kilometers from Oaxaca de Juárez) caused the term “rabies” to reappear in the Mexican state’s headlines after 15 years, when the last cases of this disease has been reported. The deaths of two of the three siblings – the youngest, two years old, was discharged as she was not showing any symptoms – opened up a number of unknowns about how this already known disease could be deadly. Waiting for a definitive diagnosis surprised the Oaxacan government, which decided to launch an investigation to see if there was any negligence in the three medical treatments the children received before they were admitted, although no further details were released nearly three weeks later What might have happened during the consultations? It took 23 days for the word “anger” to appear among the possibilities explaining the situation of the minors.
On December 21, the brothers arrived at Villa Sola de Vega Hospital, 50 kilometers from the family home. Oaxaca Deputy Health Director Jesús Alejandro Ramírez commented to this newspaper that it was found there that the two minors with symptoms “psychomotor agitation” (incomprehensible hyperactivity) and “photophobia” (phobia of light), had “neurological” signs . compatible with rabies, which led to their approval.
Among some of the responses given from the start, the Oaxacan authorities attributed the weaknesses presented by this case to the poverty the family has fallen into and the lack of knowledge to resolve a matter like this. The precarious healthcare system that some remote areas of Mexico boast has also come under severe scrutiny these weeks.
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