Munson Healthcare announced Thursday that it is expanding availability of the post-exposure rabies vaccine to the urgent care at Foster Family Community Health Center in Traverse City. Previously, post-exposure rabies treatments had only been available through local emergency rooms. A Munson representative says the change does not necessarily indicate an uptick in rabies exposures in northern Michigan.

Rabies has been in the local headlines lately, following a Grand Traverse County Health Department announcement late last month that a bat found inside a local residence had tested positive for rabies. Spread through bites or scratches from infected animals, rabies is nearly always fatal to people who are exposed and do not receive medical care before symptoms start. However, because rabies needs to travel all the way to the brain before symptoms emerge, the virus has a lengthy incubation period during which it can be prevented. Together, the rabies vaccine and Human Rabies Immune Globulin (HRIG) make for an effective post-exposure treatment method to prevent advancement of the rabies virus in humans.

Asked whether Munson’s decision to expand the availability of rabies vaccine treatments indicates an increase in rabies exposures locally, Foster Family Medical Director Dr. Jacob Szafranski tells The Ticker that the issue is more of a seasonal trend than a local outbreak that should raise alarm.

“I don't have specific numbers to share off the top of my head, but we do see a lot of patients presenting to the emergency department after bat exposures,” Szafranski says. Those numbers climb significantly in the summer months, which then means more pressure on local emergency rooms at what is already their busiest part of the year. Rolling out post-exposure treatments to the Foster Family urgent care is intended to take some of that pressure off the Munson Medical Center emergency department.

“At Munson, we're constantly seeking to improve access to resources in the appropriate setting,” Szafranski explains. “Administering these injections doesn't need emergency level care, necessarily; an urgent care is an appropriate setting for these to be administered. So, we're expanding this resource to additional sites, so that the volume of patients can be distributed a little bit more evenly between the urgent care and the ER.”

According to Szafranski, the typical patient who has had a rabies exposure receives both the HRIG and a dose of vaccine on the first day, “and then three additional doses of the vaccine in the subsequent two weeks.” Immunocompromised individuals “receive an extra dose on day 28,” he says. All those elements of post-exposure treatment are now available at the Foster Family Community Health Center.