MEXICO: Vampires

Awakened by the screams of his children, Farmer Panfilo Castro scrambled out of bed and groped for the kerosene lamp. In the flickering light, he saw a winged shadow dart toward his youngest child, then flit out through the door of the hut.

While Castro and his wife were soothing the terrified children and wiping blood from tiny gashes in necks, faces and arms, they heard screams and shouts from the nearby hut of the Zavala family. Castro went to the door and looked out. Against the paling sky, he saw the thing returning—a bat with a twelve-inch wingspread. Castro grabbed the bat, squeezed it, flung it to the floor, stomped it to death. When he looked at his hand, he saw blood spurting from a finger.

A few weeks later, three of the Castro children, one of the Zavala children and then Panfilo Castro himself died in convulsions. The village of Platanito, in the state of Sinaloa, was thunderstruck.

A local doctor diagnosed the cause of death as derriengue, a form of rabies transmitted by the vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus.* Derriengue is a scourge of Latin American cattle, killing half a million head a year in Mexico alone. A rabies-infected bat shows no symptoms for three months or so; then it suddenly goes mad, even attacks other vampires. In this way, the disease is transmitted from one bat to another. Within three to 15 days, the rabid vampire dies; anything it has bitten during that period is likely to contract derriengue.

When the local doctor’s report on the Platanito episode arrived in Mexico City last month, public-health officials dispatched two rabies experts to the area. They killed vampires with torches in abandoned buildings and hollow trees, asphyxiated them with smoke in caves, destroyed them by setting fire to the dry leaves of palm trees. Last week Mexican newspapers, with sighs of editorial relief, announced that vampires had been wiped out in the Platanito region.

* Found only in the warmer parts of the Americas, Desmodus rotundus feeds exclusively on blood. The bite of a non-rabid vampire ordinarily does a human victim no serious harm, but rabid vampires are deadly. Derriengue, like other forms of rabies, can be prevented by vaccination.