Rabies fear for woman left with eye disease after helping 'hissing' lab monkeys

dailystar.co.uk:

monkeys is being treated for rabies. Michelle Fallon was driving through Danville, Pennsylvania, on Friday, January 21 when he saw a collision between the truck transporting the animals to a research lab and a dump truck on state Route 54.“I thought I was just doing the right thing by helping,” she told her local TV station WBRE.

But she got a shock when she looked at one of the crates in the back of the pickup and saw a very angry monkey staring back at her.Shortly after the incident, she heard an official warning other members of the public not to approach the animals because of the risk of disease.The macaques had been imported from Africa and were being shipped to a quarantine facility in Florida at the time of the crash.“I was close to the monkeys, I touched the crates, I walked through their faeces so I was very close.

So I called to inquire, you know, was I safe?” She explained.After speaking to America’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], she reported to a hospital because they was concerned about her symptoms: she had scratched her hand during the rescue and had developed an eye infection.“Because the monkey did hiss at me and there was faeces around, and I did have an open cut, they just want to be [cautious],” Michele said.She added that she hadn’t been warned by the pickup driver: “He just asked if his trailer was OK,” she complained. “He never said: 'If you do come near a crate, do not touch it’.

If he would have told me that, I would have been more careful”.Michele has been given an initial dose of the rabies vaccine and will have to take a two-week course of anti-viral medication.Several monkeys had escaped in the confusion after the accident, but all one hundred of them had been accounted.