Why does rabies make people hydrophobic?
In: Biology
When you drink water there are many muscles working together to get the water down to your stomach. In encephalitic rabies you begin to have spasms (severe, involuntary contractions) of your muscles and the spasms can be triggered when you try to use the muscle. In rabies, when you try to drink water the muscles in your throat begin to spasm as they try to move the water down to your stomach and the water won’t go down. Your wind pipe (trachea) and esophagus initially share the same tube, the pharynx, so you also can’t get air into your wind pipe to breathe until the spasms stop. To make it worse, the spasms don’t just stop the second you stop trying to swallow, so it can be minutes before you can breathe again. This creates an intense fear of swallowing. Eventually, just the thought of swallowing can cause the spasms to happen.
Though rarer, you can also get the same thing when you try to breathe. The muscles in the pharynx can spasm when air his them so air can’t get into the lungs. The diaphragm can also spasm. Your lungs at baseline want to be small with no air in them but the diaphragm, a muscle at the bottom of the lungs, helps to keep your lungs from collapsing and having no air. Breathing in, inhalation, occurs because your diaphragm contacts and pulls the lungs open. This creates a vacuum in the lungs and air rushes into the lungs to fill the vacuum.When the diaphragm relaxes, the lungs can go back to their preferred form, empty, and the air is pushed up into the pharynx then out your nose or mouth. The entire goal of breathing is to get oxygen in the body and carbon dioxide out of the body. Spasms of the diaphragm keep you from doing either of these and you begin to suffocate. People have died from the spasms of the diaphragm.
Hope that is clear.
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