– How do wild rabid animals initially get infected in nature?

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I’m an english teacher, and today a student asked me what a Mink was. After googling the translation into our language, we started talking about rodents as pets and rabies came up. I told them some facts I knew about it and then the same student asked a very good question: How do the rabid wild animals get the rabies to begin with? Where does the rabies virus originate?

I then realised I don’t know the answer, so I told him that now he has something interesting to look up, and so do I. I would like to know the answer before our next class a couple days from now, so I went on google and skimmed through some articles, wikipedia and whatnot. I couldn’t find it!

So, since I don’t really know how to look for this information in depth, I figured I’d ask here. Could any virologists, vets or people wise in the matter explain, please?

Thanks in advance!

In: Biology

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

So, rabies as a virus isn’t very unique really. there are a lot of viruses that infect nerve tissue just like it does. Many of them nearly identical.

When you have two similar viruses infecting the same cell, they can sort of exchange parts of themselves with each other. This can give them new tools to work with that let them do what they do better.

Rabies specifically came from a virus that infected bats. During one of these exchanges, the virus gained the tools it needed to infect certain other mammals. And that virus ends up becoming rabies.

As for how the bats got it, it was likely through the same process. But its really hard to find out where because it happened a long time ago, at least a thousand years. We can assume if we go back far enough, we’ll find a virus that infects nerves but doesn’t kill the host. and that would eventually mutate into the harmful form we have now.

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