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
It’s only 100% lethal if it gets into your brain before you realize you have it.
At virtually any point from exposure (when you’re bitten by the infected animal typically) up until you start displaying neurologic symptoms, it can be treated with [post-exposure prophylaxis](https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/hcp/prevention-recommendations/post-exposure-prophylaxis.html), which is usually highly successful at stopping the infection, although the sooner you seek treatment, the more likely it is to be successful.
Even once it gets into the brain it’s not *absolutely* 100% lethal, as there have been just a few cases where people survive it. I’ve seen sources cite anywhere from 20-30 documented survivors of full-blown rabies *ever* (and most of those had been previously vaccinated). I mean, that’s a vanishingly small minority, given rabies kills as much as 60,000 people annually, most of them in India and Africa, but it’s not zero.
The closest we come to a cure is a fairly effective vaccine and post-exposure treatment.
Why is it so hard to treat once it’s in the brain though? Because it’s hard to treat ANYTHING in the brain. The brain is extremely sensitive, and as a matter of survival, the body is designed to keep most of the immune system from being active in there (because the immune system’s tactics can be pretty destructive, and the brain is less resilient than most other systems). In addition, the blood-brain barrier keeps most medications out of the brain.
Most of our treatments for viral illness are things like vaccines to give the immune system a heads up that the disease is coming, or anti-viral drugs that inhibit replication of the virus until the immune system can get up to speed and fully suppress it. We don’t really have those options inside the brain itself.
You can read up on the Milwaukee Protocol, though. It’s basically putting the patient in a medically induced coma and providing supportive care to minimize damage until the disease runs its course.
Latest Answers