A UK woman tragically succumbed to rabies after a trip to Morocco, where she first encountered the virus. The diagnosis came only after a psychiatrist intervened to evaluate her puzzling symptoms, as reported during an inquest.

Yvonne Ford, aged 59, passed away at Barnsley Hospital on June 11, four months following an incident in February when a puppy scratched her on a Moroccan beach. Initially dismissing the wound as insignificant, she merely cleansed it with a wet wipe and chose not to seek medical help.

After returning to England, Ford began to manifest concerning symptoms. It wasn’t until she was admitted to Barnsley Hospital’s mental health unit that rabies was identified as the cause of her condition.

Dr. Alexander Burns, the psychiatrist who examined Ford, shared with the jury that hospital staff had struggled to diagnose her condition, initially suspecting a mental health disorder due to the nature of her symptoms.

Rabies, a viral infection transmitted through animal saliva, leads to brain swelling and can manifest as severe anxiety, hallucinations, dizziness, and other symptoms such as extreme fatigue, difficulty swallowing, and eventual nervous system failure.

Rabies, a virus transmitted through saliva that causes brain inflammation, can lead to symptoms such as extreme anxiety, hallucinations and dizziness, as well as fatigue, problems consuming water and a shutdown of the central nervous system.

Burns said he had initially suspected that Ford was suffering from Lyme disease, caused by tick bites, before being informed by her husband of the dog scratch in Morocco. He also said that the short-stay unit that had been looking after Ford had been unaware of the scratch.

After learning of the scratch, Burns became “concerned that the diagnosis may be rabies, in the context of … the various neurological symptoms” and sought further expertise into the disease, as he had never come across it before in his career.

Upon researching the disease, Burns said it “became clear that all of Yvonne’s symptoms could be explained by that diagnosis”.

After the diagnosis, Ford was transferred to Sheffield Royal Hallamshire hospital’s infectious disease unit, where she died days later.

Katharine Cartwright, an infectious diseases expert from Sheffield teaching hospitals, told the jury there had been only 26 confirmed cases of rabies in the UK since 1946, but the disease had a 100% fatality rate once symptoms began to show.

However, she said post-exposure vaccinations could help if administered before symptoms presented themselves, and that vaccinating dogs and other animals that could carry rabies had been incredibly effective at eradicating the disease from the UK.

Since Ford’s death, her family have attempted to raise awareness of the prevalence of rabies around the world. Her daughter, Robyn Thomson, has joined the charity Mission Rabies in immunising dogs in countries such as Cambodia and Malawi.

Speaking to the Guardian in January, Thomson said she and her family had been shocked by her mother’s diagnosis, and had chosen to help people in Ford’s memory, saying: “I want to turn what happened into a positive, and I want to help people like Mum.”