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
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.
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