A bat on a flight from Wisconsin to Atlanta last week has sparked a national search for passengers to protect them against possible rabies.
No one knows if the bat had rabies because it escaped. Airline staffers facilitated the escape of the suspect bat, who, according to CDC standards, should have been captured & submitted for exam. I'm oh-so sure the airline staffers were thinking of CDC standards when the damned bat was flying around inside the plane...
A video of the event was made by a passenger & posted on YouTube, see here:
Note the jocular & casual attitude of the passengers towards the animal, very clearly a bat. The CDC recommendations on casual contact with bats are largely unknown and extremely ill-publicized. Nearly everyone who contracts rabies in the USA, for several years now, has contracted the rabies from a bat.
There were 50 passengers on the flight. The airline could only name 15 of them. Finding the other 35 (to be interviewed by CDC reps) hasn't been possible so far. Apparently the TSA has no idea who these 35 people are, either. OTL = out to lunch. Apparently the "S" is TSA doesn't mean 'security' after all.
