I know a symptom of rabies is Hydrophobia, but I’m so curious as to how and why the virus can do that.
And I don’t know even mean unable to drink water – I mean those visceral & terrified reactions to even being offered water.
How could a virus make you afraid of water?
In: Biology
I believe that it is that it is incredibly hard to swallow, that and feeling like one is drowning leads to a fear by association.
to put it as simply as I can, rabies spreads through your saliva. So the virus wants as much spit in your mouth as possible so you can give it to others. In order to force that to happen, the virus speeds up how much spit you make and also makes swallowing anything nearly impossible by making your throat close up and hurt very very much. You aren’t so much afraid, as much as the virus is doing with it has to do to spread by making it so painful your body won’t let you anymore.
Your amygdala is being eaten alive so there’s a bunch of sensory input that is responded to with abject fear and avoidance, including the ability to swallow.
To piggyback off of this does anyone know if people are aware of what’s happening in the later stages?
The virus takes time to travel through the peripheral nerves from the bite location to the brain stem. Once in the brain stem it will eventually kill you, but it will also cause the muscles required for swallowing to spasm when the brain attempts to send signals to said muscles.
Ingestion of all kinds starts with visualization and preparation in the brain.
Also, a tangential connection and possibly unrelated: your brain sends out signals to muscles that are essentially just “do this action” and there are control gates along the pathway that modify this input to effectively control and limit excessive movement dictated from the brain. Cerebral palsy is simply a dysfunction of this control gating pathway and babies often jerk wildly simply because this pathway is still developing.
Not sure if mods will allow this: Kurzgesagt does a great video on the Lyssa virus. It should answer your question better than one comment here. https://youtu.be/4u5I8GYB79Y?si=t5WjgamNOp70XwiF
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