The Eastern European tale of a vampire, a corpse that came back to life and sucked blood from the neck of its human victim, dates back to the Middle Ages. Indeed, the bat was named for the legend rather than the legend originating with the bat. The vampire bat feeds mainly on the blood of cattle, horses, and wild mammals such as deer and peccaries. It seldom bites humans. The harm from such bites arises not from the amount of blood lost, which is relatively small, but rather from the exposure of the livestock to secondary infections, parasites, and the transmission of viral-borne diseases such as rabies.
Rabies occurs naturally in many wild animals.
Actually, a higher incidence of the disease is found in skunks and foxes than in bats. In the United States the rate of occurrence is so small, barely a fraction of a percent, that there is very little danger to humans. Though experiments have shown that theoretically rabies is a virus that can be air-borne or transmitted through contact with infected bat urine, there is not one documented case of a human contracting the disease this way. Bat bites of humans are uncommon and rabies in humans resulting from such bites is extremely rare. But, bats can harbor the rabies virus and, therefore, should be handled with caution.