Newsroom With A View

I learned a lot about bats and rabies the past few days.

The main thing I learned is that many people are not rational about bats.

A bat got in my house. We don’t know quite how. When we eventually found where it hid, I was able to cover it with an old T-shirt and get it out of the house.

That, to me, was that.

Some well meaning friends and coworkers disagreed. They urged us to get rabies shots.

“If bats are rabid, they shed the disease as they fly,” one said, so we probably had been exposed.

This seemed unlikely to me.

And yet, the urgency of those warnings lingered in my mind and made me finally call a doctor – who agreed with me and, it turns out, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which says, “People can’t get rabies just from seeing a bat in an attic, in a cave, at summer camp, or from a distance while it is flying. In addition, people can’t get rabies from having contact with bat guano (feces), blood, or urine, or from touching a bat on its fur.”

Further, bats rarely contract rabies, the CDC says: Even among bats submitted for rabies testing because they could be captured, were obviously weak or sick, or had been captured by a cat, only about 6 percent had rabies.

Merlin Tuttle, one of the world’s leading bat conservationists, wrote in an article on his website, “Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation,” that the risk of humans getting rabies from a bat – even a rabid bat – is highly exaggerated:

“Given the consequences of a wrong decision, it is appropriate to take each possible exposure to rabies extremely seriously, … . However, simply being near or even touching a rabid animal is not considered to be an exposure, … . An exposure requires a bite or contact between an open wound or mucous membrane with saliva or nervous tissue from an infected animal.”

Regardless of these assurances, some people argued that it would be better to be safe.

“Here’s the scary thing: by the time you have symptoms of rabies, it’s too late and almost always fatal,” one wrote to me on Facebook.

Maybe. But 100 percent assurance carries its own cost.

Last year, a woman who encountered a bat in Georgia and wasn’t certain whether it bit her got treatment, which cost $17,000. A woman in Maryland paid $11,000, and one in North Carolina paid $22,000.

In all of those cases, though, there was either a bite or a suspected bite, and doctors recommended getting treatment.

In our case, the only thing that bit me may have been karma. My mother was quick to assert that the bat in our house was divine justice because once, many years ago, while my parents were away from home I took a furry, toy bat and thumbtacked it to the ceiling in their bedroom.

If having a bat in my own house was punishment for frightening my parents, and I had it to do over, I’d tack that sucker to the ceiling again.

It was hilarious.

What are you afraid of?

Most of us are afraid of things that very rarely happen, according to a recent poll of nearly 1,500 North Carolina residents by Elon University.

Well, except for being shot in a public place. That USED to be pretty rare, but a majority — 51 percent — perceives that it’s at least somewhat of a possibility now, and more than a third, 37 percent, feel they are very much at risk.

The poll asked people how safe they personally feel about 37 hypothetical risks. “Shootings in public” topped the list of what people felt least safe about. Only 7 percent said they felt very safe.

But close behind that was terrorism, with 33 percent feeling very unsafe and only 7 feeling very safe.

What’s most odd about that is that there is very little difference how people in our state’s big cities feel about the risk of terrorism and how those in sparsely populated counties feel. In fact, more rural residents — 34 percent — than urban residents — 30 percent — feel very unsafe, even though there has never been a terror attack in a rural part of the United States for the very obvious reason that in order to inspire terror, there have to be a lot of people hurt and a lot of TV cameras nearby to broadcast the news. It would take over an hour for some TV crews to get to Pineola in Avery County from Charlotte.

Things make a little more sense if you combine the “very unsafe” and “somewhat unsafe” answers.

Then the thing that the most people feel at least somewhat unsafe about is walking along roads that don’t have sidewalks, 66 percent. Only 5 percent feel very safe about it.

People are very slightly more afraid of snakes (a total of 56 percent feel either very or somewhat unsafe) and ticks (57 percent) than tornadoes (51 percent).

The same amount of people, 16 percent, feel equally unsafe about dogs and deer, but more (31 percent) feel very safe about deer (only 27 percent feel very safe about dogs).

And again, urban and rural residents feel exactly the same level of risk about deer — 4 percent very unsafe in both, even though there are a lot more deer in Kings Creek than Raleigh.

People are least afraid of trains: Only 4 percent feel very unsafe about trains, and just 8 percent feel even somewhat unsafe.

On the other hand, people feel pretty darned safe about driving — only 5 percent very unsafe and 20 percent somewhat unsafe — even though there are literally hundreds of traffic accidents each day across the state and being a good driver has little to do with it — at least half of the drivers involved do nothing wrong. Some multi-car wrecks have only one driver at fault, and if something falls onto the road — a tree, a jumping deer, a big rock thrown by an angry teenager, a fish dropped by an eagle — then no driver is at fault.

But the poll left a lot of areas of risk uncovered.

For instance, what about your coffee shop exploding, not because of terrorism but plain old natural gas? It happened in Durham on Wednesday and killed the shop’s owner, injured nearly 20 people, destroyed one big building and damaged several others.

What about losing your job by accident? Just happened to a judge in Texas because he told someone he planned to run for higher office, and the Texas state constitution says a candidacy announcement by anyone holding a judicial office amounts to an official resignation. (Seems like a judge ought to be familiar with that, though.)

Perhaps most importantly, what about the risk of bees living inside your eyes? Just this past week a woman in Taiwan went to her doctor about pain in her eye, and the doctor found four sweat bees had somehow gotten into her eye socket, surviving there by drinking her tears. We have sweat bees in every county in North Carolina — you stand far more chance in Sawmills of encountering sweat bees than terrorists, and now they know humans are edible.

Good luck if your eyes don’t itch for the rest of the day.