why are rabies incurable
In: 4050
A lot of folks are missing a key point, so I’ll try to give it a go.
Rabies is a virus that can only really attack nerve cells. These little guys are spread throughout your body. The biggest cluster is your brain, which is entirely nerve cells, but they also have little strings going from your brain and throughout your body. These cells are so numerous, that if you lose one string, it won’t really affect your function too much.
When someone is infected with rabies, it enters the body and finds one of these strings. It then starts slowly eating its way back up that string to your brain. This is what is happening during that month or so between when you’re infected and when symptoms show. During this period, the virus is only slowly infecting that one string, so it can be stopped. Symptoms don’t show because you don’t need every nerve string in your body. But when it gets to your brain? That’s when it gets BAD. The virus goes from slowly eating in one direction to suddenly being able to eat in every direction. Each new cell it infects is connected to a dozen other cells, and it rapidly infects your whole brain, then moves down and starts to infect all the other nerve strings your brain is infected to.
An analogy to better explain it: imagine if you poorer a thin line of gunpowder on the ground. This line is maybe 50 feet long, and at end you place a large barrel that is full of gunpowder. If you lit the other end, It wouldn’t instantly explode the whole line. It would probably slowly travel down that line. The fire couldn’t explode the whole line at once because it only has a tiny bit of fuel at a time, so it has to slowly spread to the next bit of fuel to continue the reaction. When it gets to the end of the line though? It’s gonna explode.
If you wanted to stop the explosion, you could easily stomp on the small fire when it’s trying to travel down the gunpowder line and the reaction would stop. If the fire gets to the barrel though, you can’t possibly stop the reaction.
That’s basically how your immune system can stop rabies. While it is traveling up your nerve string, your body can stomp it like it would stomp the fire traveling down a line of gunpowder. When it gets to the brain though, it will infect new cells far to quickly to be contained, and the reaction will be unstoppable.
To remove the rabies you would need to either:
A) Have immune cells than can enter neurons and destroy the rabies (doesn’t exist)
B) Remove every infected neuron in your body, which includes the vast majority of all of your muscle (thats a terrible idea)
So. Yeah. Thats where we stand on the issue.
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Many diseases are incurable, even viral diseases (AIDS, Herpes, etc.). That’s just because has found a good way to do it yet. Hell, we can’t even “cure” the flu, it just kinda tends to resolve on its own, and we have a few medications that can vaguely try to help the process along, but it’s still our immune system doing the heavy lifting.
The really interesting thing that sets rabies apart from almost any other disease is that it has such an incredibly high (basically 100%) fatality rate, and that’s basically just due to how it works: it hides inside your nerves which is a place that your immune system generally has trouble reaching (other diseases like Herpes use this trick as well, but they’re thankfully not as destructive). Then it travels through them up into your brain, and once there it just generally causes havoc and turns it all into goo. Your brain is a place that your immune can reach even less, so once it’s there there’s really no stopping it, and you kinda need your brain to live so the aggressive destruction always ends up being fatal.
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Rabies is curable!
The problem, is that it hides from your immune system until it is already at its destination in your brain and starting to kill you.
As a result, symptoms show up far too late to do anything about it and you die.
Someone who has contracted rabies can be successfully cured by the vaccine provided they receive it soon enough.
An infection can take days, weeks, months, or even years to become fatal.
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