I understand the basics of vaccines and I get the rabies vaccine works, but in the instance where you are attacked by a rabid animal and bitten, how does getting the vaccine immediately help with the development of the disease? Is it not already in your bloodstream?
In: Biology
What rabies *does*, it’s “trick”, is it hides within your nerves. Your nerves are so armor coated nearly nothing, your own immune system included, can get past that armor. Rabies and a few other tricksy viruses *can* get past the armor and once they do, they are home free.
Between infection and getting inside your nerves, you have a window of time where your body can and does react to rabies and fight it, it just doesn’t typically do so fast enough to stop it from getting behind your nerve armor.
The first rabies vaccine was actually the first modern scientific vaccine and was created by Pasteur (the milk, wine, and beer guy) involved taking living rabies various and weaking it severely and then injecting it into your body progressively over several days. This was a big deal because Pasteur was fresh on heals of becoming famous for providing solid evidence for Germ Theory, the idea that microorganisms can have an impact on the macroscopic world. It was Pasteur for really blew the lid on germ theory with his work on wine and beer fermentation and his victory lap was producing an actual, deliberate, scientific vaccine to prevent a 100% fatal illness – rabies.
In his regimen each day you’d receive a slightly stronger shot of rabies until your finally just getting straight up injected with live rabies doses and your body has built up a full on immune reaction and just wipes out clean from your body.
With modern tech we’ve learned how to ‘kill’ (since viruses aren’t technically alive, you can’t really kill them so the term is used to mean “make it so they can’t infect you”) rabies viral particles so can just inject you with the “ID cards” of rabies so your body knows how to recognize it, without actually having the risk of actually becoming infected.
Fun Fact: When Pasteur developed his vaccine, he would suck the infectious saliva from dying dogs using a long metal straw and spit the saliva from the straw into flasks. His team kept a loaded revolver on hand during these sessions in case anyone accidently sucked the saliva into their mouths and infected themselves. Fortunately, they never needed to use them.
Fun Fact 2: What made Pasteur super special was that his previous work was on microscopic stuff you *could see* with a microscope. He proved these microscopic things could make us sick, spoil food, and ferment beer. BUT he *couldn’t* see viruses and he never did, we didn’t develop the tech for the for another century. But he figured there must be *something* in the saliva that made people get Rabies and it must be *like* a bacteria and he treated as such. He never actually saw the rabies virus, he just figured out *what it must be* and how to fight it.
Latest Answers