The easiest thing to keep in mind is to never touch any wild animal. All wild animals will bite if they feel threatened. If you have been bitten by an animal, try to capture the animal to have it tested for rabies by your local health department. If you can not catch the animal go to the emergency and ask for rabies post exposure shots, again insist on it. This is very important, you do not want to wait for more than 2 days, especially if the bite was close to the head.
Bats are one of the most misunderstood animals in the world.
One such misconception about bats is that they are all rabid. Bats can contract rabies, but they also suffer the symptoms of the disease and eventually die from it. Bats are not unaffected carriers of rabies. So if all bats had rabies, there would be no bats in the world. This figure is highly inflated because only those bats that are suspected of having rabies are brought in to be tested.