Rabies vaccine was first invented as early as around 1885 by Louis Pasteur. I was just wondering why rabies virus has very insignificant medical advancement and is still 100% lethal with no cure.
In: Biology
The first symptoms of rabies are once it’s already living in your brain and causing irreparable damage. Even if you could purge all the virus out of you the moment you experience symptoms, it’d be too late to fully recover. And it’s hard to get antiviral medications into your brain to treat the infection because the brain has a membrane around it for keeping strange chemicals out.
That’s why it makes much more sense to treat the rabies infection before it starts showing symptoms. After you get bitten by a rabid animal, the rabies virus takes months to crawl its way to your brain. Any time during those months, your immune system can kill it, and so can antiviral medications you take.
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