One of the rabies symptoms is a fear of water, also called a hydrophobia.
Wikipedia article on rabies even shows a diseased trying to drink water but still unable to.
My question is: how it works on the biological level? Is it happening in consciousness, subconsciousness, or where? How does the sickness knows the water is approaching the mouth? How? Can one trick the sickness by making person close their eyes? Or by putting water in a closed box and then moving it towards the patient? Etc?
In: 98
I remember reading that it’s not actually hydrophobia. The parasitic virus causes the host to experience extreme pain when trying to swallow anything. So it’s a fear of pain from swallowing anything that the host experiences.
After reaching the brain the virus moves to the salivary glands and saliva where it waits to be transferred to another host.
The pain it creates from swallowing is to keep the mouth flooded with saliva so that the virus has the best chance of survival.
Searching for ‘hydrophobia’ yields two earlier topics, of which /r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7n7g8i/eli5_how_does_rabies_induce_hydrophobia/ has a nice explanation that it just works on the muscles involved with swallowing. The hydrophobia is then developed autonomously by the victim.
Same way getting bitten by a dog can make you scared of dogs but that doesn’t mean the bite itself had some biological/neurological pathway directly to the brain to cause the fear, it’s the person’s observation and instinct that then forms this behavior.
The hydrophobic comes from the nerves in the throat being damaged. If anything touches the back of the throat; any water or saliva or food, all the muscles in the throat and neck suddenly tense up with maximum strength causing extreme pain and choking.
Because having anything in their mouth (including water) causes extreme pain, they can’t drink and have to drool because even having saliva in their mouth will be incredibly painful.
The hydrophobia resulted from the rabies virus is due to esophageal spasming, which in turn causes the host to have an aversion to water or swallowing liquids in general.
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Phobia isn’t just fear, in this case it means aversion towards water.
It becomes very painful and so it is avoided.
theres organisms that can straight up take over a hosts mind and make the host do what the invading organism wants it to do
there are many types of organisms that can do this
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