Just saw a video about rabies having 100% kill rate, peaked my interest.
Why is rabies such a horrible thing and what does it actually do to be able to kill you without an actual cure etc?
EDIT: I didn’t expect so many responses to this, thank you to everyone who answered!
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It is no longer 100%. There was a story on NPR about a guy who came up with a way to treat it. It turns out that the body can beat it, the disease is just faster than your body’s disease fighting system. I can’t remember exactly how he did it but he put the person in a suspended state till the body could catch up.
I think this is it: https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/rodney-v-death-2209
We currently don’t have a way to really treat viral infections, best you can do is treat the symptoms and hope your immune system clears it. Rabies infection doesn’t really show symptoms before the virus has made it into the brain and as others have pointed out, it traveles to the brain via nerve cells and not through blood which makes it harder for your immune system to catch it if you are not vaccinated.
Once your brain is infected, your immune system will try to clear it out but the damage has already been done. Your immune system will do it’s best, but it’s causing more damage in the process. What makes it harder for your immune system is that not all immune cells can access the brain even during a neuroimmune response. Other infections of the brain have high mortality rates as well such as bacterial meningitis and naegleria fowleri. It’s hard to get medication to reach the brain because of the blood brain barrier, and your immune system response will usually cause more swelling and more damage in the brain.
There have been a few cases of people surviving rabies through a series of treatments called the milwaukee protocol. Iirc the patient is put into medical coma, the body temperature is controlled to try to decrease the swelling of the brain and antiviral medication is administered together with antibiotics and antifungal medicine to treat any secondary infections. The deep coma will usually be fatal or cause long lasting damage anyways. Most of the few survivors died to complications in a few years with the only exception being, as far as I know, Jeanna Giese.
I’d point out that deaths from rabies are very rare in the western world as the vaccine is extremely effective even after being bitten as the incubation period of rabies is very long. In the western world, most cases are caused by bat bites as some people might not take a small bat bite very seriously. If you ever wake up with a bat in your room, get vaccinated just in case.
Just FYI – it’s “piqued” not “peaked” when you’re talking about stimulating curiosity in a subject
Man this is a popular question. I’ll start by saying nobody knows for sure how exactly rabies kills you, but I’ll start with a tl;dr
tl;dr It takes a few weeks for your immune system to eliminate rabies but it only takes a few days to disrupt the brain enough to stop your heart and breathing.
The longer answer begins with the fact that that our brains are fragile and easily damaged. Rabies isn’t the only brain virus, there are many others, yet none of them have the near 100% mortality rate of rabies in humans (dogs and bats sometimes actually fight it off however). But viral infections of your brain are still very serious, and you can even die from chicken box once it gets into the brain. So to answer the question, you first need to understand why any virus is deadly in the brain.
1) Our brains are trapped unlike any other organ, inside a pressurized shell of bone, the skull. That means there is no room for any swelling. You can die just from a little bleeding in the brain because the pressure from the blood. When a virus attacks, the swelling can be enough to cause damage or change how the brain normally works, or it can be bad enough to cut off blood flow to parts of the brain.
2) The immune system is somewhat restricted in the brain because of #1 above. You don’t want any swelling. So it’s like building a really tall wall but with no soldiers inside. That’s a good defense unless someone sneaks in, then you’re dead. Rabies is unique in that instead of using the blood stream which is where the wall to the brain is, they sneak in through nerves channels. like a secret door into the castle.
3) All viruses do some damage in the beginning while your immune system ramps up. If it’s a sore throat , no big deal. the cells die and get replaced. But your brain is a very finely tuned instrument. And damage or even just change to the chemistry of the brain can lead to death. Your brain doesn’t have the ability to heal like other tissues. Damage may be permanent and cumulative. It takes a few weeks for your immune system to eliminate rabies but it only takes a few days to disrupt the brain enough to stop your heart and breathing. In other words you don’t have to kill brain cells to make them stop working.
final tl;dr human brains are easily damaged by any virus, and rabies is really good at getting into your brain.
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It’s literally the closest thing to a real zombie virus. It travels via the nervous system and thus is able to evade your immune system for a very long time. As it travels, it kills off nerve cells until it eventually reaches your brain starting usually at the brain stem. The first symptoms are tingling, numbness, and lack of fine motor control starting at the area of entry. Then as it travels to and begins destroying your brain stem, you start loosing basic motor control through your whole body. As the condition slowly progresses you get more and more brain damage from the bottom up. This starts of as irritability (why some animals bite), memory loss, instinct loss (why some animals lose their fear of humans during the process), insomnia, and loss of motor control in areas such as your throat which makes you choke on water. This is where the fear of drinking water comes from.
It’s incurable at this stage and what damage has been done cannot be undone. Once you start feeling the first symptoms then you have a 99.9% chance of an agonizing death. The first symptoms can take upwards of MONTHS to show up. So if you suspect you have been bitten or scratched by an infected animal you must seek treatment ASAP.
Modern treatment consists of a protocol. You are given multiple vaccines in stages every few months, and your first visit you will also be given anti-bodies injected into the area where you were bitten or scratched which gives your body a head start for the vaccine to take effect. This treatment is 99% effective from what I’ve read, but that’s ONLY if you start treatment within the WEEK of exposure.
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Just an aside to say the correct phrase is *piqued* your interest. It’s not that it has made your interest *peak*, it’s that it is *pleasantly stimulating*. It’s got the same root as *piquant*.
Anyway, [here’s a great video explaining rabies](https://youtu.be/4u5I8GYB79Y?si=vITb2ryoU2p-RwmL).
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