The minor of eight years, bitten by a bat in early December, in the small Oaxaca town of Palo de Lima, He died on Saturday, State Health Services confirmed in a statement. The girl had been hospitalized in serious condition since 24 December. The autopsy performed on his brother, aged seven, deceased on December 29 and exhibiting the same symptoms, indicated that his death was due to rabies.
The health services indicated that during her stay at the medical centre, “a team of multidisciplinary specialists” cared for the patient. On December 27, three days after hospitalization, authorities indicated that the eight-year-old girl would be declared brain dead, because she was unresponsive to stimuli. Rabies, explain the experts consulted by this newspaper, has a lethality close to 100%, so early diagnosis may be the key to counteracting its deadly effects.
Doctor specializing in epidemiology Óscar Sosa says that the lethality close to 100% is explained by the complexity of detecting the disease. He says there are several ways to collect samples for analysis, but points out that most of them can be obtained when the patient is already hospitalized and, therefore, in a “serious” condition. “If I apply a vaccine after an attack by an animal that may have rabies, there is no need to collect samples. But there’s no way to know if it’s properly preventing anger in the person. The only way would be when the animal was diagnosed and, having applied the vaccine, the person had no effect, ”he explains.
A bat attack on December 1 in the humble rural community of Palo de Lima (100 kilometers from Oaxaca de Juárez) caused the term “rabies” to reappear in the headlines of the Mexican state after 15 years, when the last cases of this disease has been reported. The death of two of the three brothers – the youngest, aged two, was discharged because he did not show symptoms – opened up a series of unknowns about how this disease, already known, could be fatal. The wait to get a clear diagnosis surprised the Oaxaca government, which decided to open an investigation to determine if there was negligence in the three medical treatments the children received before being hospitalized, even though almost three weeks later were there more details about what What might have happened during the consultations? It took 23 days for the word “anger” to appear among the possibilities that explained the situation of the minors.
On December 21, the brothers arrived at the Villa Sola de Vega hospital, 50 kilometers from the family home. The deputy health director of Oaxaca, Jesús Alejandro Ramírez, commented to this newspaper that there it was found that the two minors with symptoms had “psychomotor agitation” (incomprehensible hyperactivity) and “photophobia” (phobia of light), “neurological” signs compatible with rabies, which led to their hospitalization.
Among some of the answers that have been given since the beginning, the Oaxacan authorities have attributed the weaknesses that this case presents to the poverty in which the family is immersed and the lack of knowledge to resolve a matter like this. Even the precarious health system in some isolated areas of Mexico has been strongly questioned in recent weeks.
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