How dangerous is rabies?
Rabies is a fatal condition but it is preventable by vaccination. It is important for people who are at risk through their work or through travelling to countries where rabies is circulating in animals to seek advice on vaccination. Once clinical rabies develops, it is almost always fatal. Those few people who have survived the infection have suffered serious long-term disability. How do humans catch rabies? There have been around 20 human cases of rabies imported into England and Wales since 1946. Humans generally catch rabies through being bitten by an infected animal (usually a dog). In this country, rabies has long been eliminated in the animal population, so recent human cases in the UK have all been associated with exposure to infected animals elsewhere in the world. There are no documented cases of human-to-human spread, except by the artificial route of corneal transplant. In a corneal transplant a part of the cornea is surgically removed after death and grafted into the eye of
