Family of British woman who died from rabies speak out to warn others

ITV News

28-07-2025

Yvonne Ford's family speak out on ITV's This Morning
The family of a woman who died from rabies have revealed how she was sunbathing when she caught the disease following an innocuous scratch.
Yvonne Ford, from Barnsley, died in June after suddenly developing symptoms four months after a holiday to Morocco.
Appearing on ITV's This Morning, the 59-year-old's husband, Ron, said: "Two days before we came home, we're on the beach outside the hotel, and there were lots of dogs running about everywhere, and there was a puppy actually underneath the sunbed of Yvonne's.
"She put her leg down, it startled the dog, and it just scratched her. It didn't bleed, it it didn't really mark her."
He said there were no signs of illness for weeks. The couple went to Florida in May and it was only after they returned that the symptoms started.
Their daughter, Robyn, said: "My dad and my mum went to York on a little fishing trip in the camper van and on the Saturday, my mum started with a horrendous headache, unbearable headache, to the point where she couldn't sleep at all.
"The Monday after that, my dad had taken her to A and E because the headache was so severe. On the Monday she went into hospital walking, talking, doing everything, and come the Friday she couldn't walk, talk, swallow. She had a fear of water, she was horrendously hallucinating beyond what we could even imagine.
"She just deteriorated within five days."
What is rabies?
Rabies is a rare but serious infection that is usually caught from the bite or scratch of an infected animal, such as dogs, bats, raccoons and foxes.
In the UK, it is only found in some bats.
Although the risk of getting it while travelling is small, rabies is more common in parts of Asia, Africa and Central and South America.
Symptoms of rabies usually take three to 12 weeks to appear, but they can appear after a few days or not for several months or years.
They include numbness or tingling, hallucinations, acute anxiety, difficulty swallowing or breathing and paralysis.
It is almost always fatal once symptoms appear, but vaccination and early treatment can prevent it.
Mrs Ford's family are speaking out to warn others about the dangers.
Her son Adam said: "We don't want people to go through what we've gone through. Seeing your mum deteriorating like that. We don't want anybody to see that ever again.
"So if we can just get the awareness out - just check, check, check, contact your doctor, get the injections. That's all we want, awareness, awareness, awareness."
Robyn is volunteering with the charity Mission Rabies, which works to vaccinate dogs in regions across Asia and Africa to help reduce the spread of rabies—a disease that tragically still claims many lives each year.
She said: "Since we've put it out on Facebook, to raise awareness, we have had people messages saying that they've been abroad, they've had scratches from cats and dogs and they've then gone to get the vaccine, so I feel like we are doing something, we're making a little bit of a change, and then if we can do that for one family then we've made a difference."