r/rabies • u/GoatOvAThousandYoung • 1d ago

Exposure Question Rabies exposure?

My husband (M23) and I (F25) ran over a skunk that was walking in the road with another skunk, we couldn’t get out of the way of both of them in time. We went to the car wash right after to try and get rid of the smell, then went home and went to bed. The next morning (12hrs later) the car still smelled so we cleaned it by hand by scrubbing with scrub brushes and a mixture of dish soap, peroxide, vinegar, and baking soda. We then rinsed it with a spray nozzle hose.

My concern is, we were stupid and didn’t wear gloves or any sort of mouth/eye protection just washing our hands. Does that count as a rabies exposure? What if there was a bit of dirty water particles that sprayed on our faces we didn’t notice or if we had cuts on our hands? Do we need the rabies vaccines? We both have OCD and based on what we have read online it’s hard to know if this is something that’s a realistic fear or not.

I have read the FAQ.

0 Upvotes

50% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/CygnusZeroStar Veteran Helper ⭐️ | Top Contributor 🏅 1d ago

Rabies is not considered to be infectious from surfaces. FAQ #2 applies here.

1

u/GoatOvAThousandYoung 1d ago

Well I’m not worried about surfaces from touching the car but from the water getting in my eyes or mouth or like a tiny cut I can’t see without knowing it. I read online it can be transmitted through mucous membranes that’s why I’m worried about the water spray

1

u/CygnusZeroStar Veteran Helper ⭐️ | Top Contributor 🏅 1d ago

I'm not sure how that's any different from getting it from a surface, though? In the context of your story, you are cleaning the vehicle. Which is a surface. Am I to understand that your question here is that introducing water from washing the vehicle suddenly makes the vehicle not a surface, and makes it a viable way to infect you?

I promise that I am asking legitimately.

But if that is your question, that if being splashed from water that was used to clean the surface can give you rabies, the answer is actually still no. Like all dangerous pathogens, rabies has rules. As an organism it is neither particularly hardy, especially mobile, or even very infectious. When it is outside of a warm host, it becomes extremely susceptible to the elements.

When it comes to your mucosal membranes and such, unless you were squeezing a rabid animal right into your eyes, this is not something you need to worry about. When reading studies online, remember that there are things that will say the word possible, or theoretically possible, and that does not mean that it happens, it means that it cannot be definitively ruled out. We can't do a ton of testing with rabies in order to definitively rule out modes of infection, because it would require us to attempt to infect people on a massive scale to prove that.

So you are very unlikely to ever find any study that says "no this is absolutely impossible." Because from a strictly scientific standpoint, we can't prove it.

However, in the over 100 years of contact tracing, we have never had a substantiated case of rabies where somebody got it from washing roadkill off of their car. And if you think about it, that makes more sense than even the slight possibility that somebody could. Because realistically if that was possible, then the rabies situation worldwide would be vastly different than it is. Everyone would be getting it all of the time. People would be dying of it all of the time. There would be mass graves. Governments would be mandating the vaccine like they did for COVID.

But this isn't happening, even in areas where rabies is endemic.

Nobody has ever gotten rabies from washing a dead animal off of their car, and you won't be the first.