Full moon bites
Although, one could assume that the following concerns vampires or werewolves, we occupy ourselves with another kind of bite, namely the bite of animals to humans. There is a study of the E.R. department of the Bradford Royal Infirmatory in Bradford, England from 1997–1999. Here, the question, whether animals bite more often at the full moon, has been investigated. 1,621 patients were looked at, who had been treated for animal bites. The majority of affected patients had been bitten by dogs (95.1 %), others by cats (3.4 %), horses (0.8%) and rats (0.7 %). The surprising aspect of this study is, that indeed a significant connections could be detected between the full moon happenings and the animal bites. Hence, this should be the first study, known to us, which provides such a result!
»Results: The incidence of animal bites rose significantly at the time of a full moon. With the period of the full moon as the reference period, the incidence rate ratio of the bites for all other periods of the lunar cycle was significantly lower (P<0.001).
Conclusion: The full moon is associated with a significant increase in animal bites to humans.«Bhattacharjee C, Bradley P et al.
BMJ. 2000 December 23; 321(7276): 1559–1561.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
One has to remain critical, as there is a large amount of other studies (also about animal bites), which do not come to this conclusion, but – quite the opposite – repeatedly disprove that there is no connection between moon happenings and accidents. This in particular makes one think, because an existing effect of the full moon on our lives should easily be detected in form of a statistic. But this is not the case. Almost all investigations of scientists keep producing the same result: »No significant relationship with the full moon«. We already wrote in our blog article Between scepticism and mysticism, that the effect of the full moon to humans, needs to be looked at very differentiated.
With regard to animals, it is certainly advisable to approach our four-legged friends with sensitivity and care. After all, it is very likely that the bites were caused by our own behaviour and less by the full moon …
