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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i have a mini ELI5 for this question, why don’t humans act like other mammals when infected with rabies? we all hear about the infected animals running around and acting aggressive, humans get irritated from what i’ve seen but they aren’t actively attacking others like animals would have
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To be precise, rabies has no 100% mortality rate. A very small minority of people have survived it without any treatment, or with an experimental treatment. However it’s safe to say that >99.9% of people won’t survive rabies without vaccines.
If you get rabies and you’re an antivaxxer, just be in the 0.1% and you survive, problem solved. /s
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Not 100% about 2 people have survived it. A girl in America got bitten in church by a bat, but survived.
Do people ever get the vaccine as a prophylactic if they live around bats and stuff? I know it’s a liver stab, right?! Or is it more that people try and like monitor the bat population? Tell me why some people still die from this scary shit?
I got bit by a stray cat last year. I’d never seen the cat before and she was in bad shape. I was trying to get fluids into her when she convulsed and her teeth clamped down on my finger to the bone. Hurt like hell! The cat dies a few hours later.
When I went to the doctor the next day and told him the story, he immediately wanted to start rabies shots. He explained that, by the time rabies symptoms show up it’s too late to do anything to stop it and it’s 100% fatal. So, of course, I started the treatment!
My husband, who had fortunately thought to bag the cat and stick it in the extra fridge, had to take the dead cat to our vet, where they apparently cut off her head and sent it to the local health department for testing. A grisly business, for sure!
It took a few days to get the results back from the health department. The cat did not have rabies. I had already had the second shot by then and didn’t have to finish the series, thank goodness!
But if we had waited until we got the results back and the cat had tested positive, too much time would have elapsed and I would be dead now.
Rabies is nothing to fool around with. Like I said, once you start having symptoms, it’s already too late.
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