why are rabies incurable
In: 4050
Rabies (that’s the name of the disease, not a name for multiple diseases) is curable until you’re almost dead of it. It’s the same as the deadly kinds of E. coli, and many other diseases — there’s a treatment, but if you wait until the disease has already won the treatment stops working. It’s just that rabies starts causing noticeable symptoms when you’re almost dead and the disease has already won.
The treatment for rabies is a vaccine. Vaccines are normally preventative, but for diseases that spend a long time hiding and not making you sick before they cause problems it’s sometimes possible to make a vaccine that cures you (by teaching your immune system to force the pathogen out of hiding and kill it before it gets around to making you sick). The shingles vaccine is given after the chickenpox/shingles virus is already in your body, and there’s a company working on a new HPV vaccine that works the same way.
The first noticeable symptoms of rabies start when the virus is already in your brain, where your immune system has a hard time reaching, and has already started causing damage. At that point there’s no cure, partly because a lot of the damage has already been done and partly because we don’t have any medicines fast-acting enough to stop it. But there’s a long stretch of time before the first noticeable symptoms when the virus is silently living in your body and you can still be cured of it.
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