I am thinking about the two grizzly bears at our local zoo that had to be killed in the 90’s because one of them scratched a child who jumped into their caged area. They could then confirm that neither animal had rabies.
Why is there not a more novel way to test for rabies? And why can’t the human be tested for it?
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Others have had good answers about why rabies is hard to test for and why the test is important enough to be worth killing an animal to run it.
I’ll just add that as a matter of biology, we almost certainly could invent a better test for rabies. But doing so would require a bit of research and a lot of development. We would need biologists, medical doctors, chemists, and lab specialists to build a test, make it cheap, and then do a lot of testing to make sure it’s as accurate as the old test.
This process would cost a lot of money and sadly there isn’t a lot of money dedicated to rabies. It kills about 60,000 people per year but only about 3 Americans. The number in Europe is also very small. Most of the worlds medical research is done in the USA and Europe and 90% of global medical profits are made there. Therefore diseases that don’t affect Americans and Europeans don’t get a lot of attention.
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