Last year, I uploaded “The Eye of Sauron” seen in a negative Rabies DFA slide. Today, I’m uploading positive Rabies DFA slides for you to see. The featured image you see up top is an impression from a positive fox brain.
Many of the positives we see are not usually terrestrial animals but our flying friends the bats! Their brains are typically so small, that if they are positive, they light up so much that it almost hurts your eyes to look at them. Except that it’s so pretty you don’t want to look away!
In this photo below, this is a positive impression from the brain of a bat (400x under the fluorescent microscope). Down the center, you can see a single bat hair. Bats are actually quite furry and soft little things, and sometimes the hairs get stuck to the slide along with the brain if the scalpel takes it with it during the cut.
This set of photos taken using my Sony RXII.
Gabriela January 8, 2017
Hello, learning to diagnose rabies using FAT – now in foxes and to tell you it is real challenge – despite staring in negative and positive control slides – sometimes its clear to me its negative but then I see few shiny yellow/ green spots and my confidence in negativity is over :( colleague used to micrscope without using immerse oil . Is that OK ? Do you think that quality of Commercial conjugate used matters a lot or not so much ?