I was running to an old “This American Life” and heard a story about a woman attacked by a rabid raccoon and the trouble she had getting the right shots, which made me wonder about it. I know that once the disease gets all up in your nerves, there’s a nearly 100% fatality rate (I know about that teenage girl who survived, and that there’s another kid somewhere else who may have.) Rabies is a hell of a way to die, so I assume that victims are largely kept out of it with painkillers. If they weren’t, though, would they become aggressive, like the raccoon did? (Abroad in daylight, chased a woman for some time down a road, bit her leg and would not release, had to be held down with two people standing on a board, took dozens and dozens of whacks to the head with a tire iron before dying…)
Well, the wikipedia article on rabies states that delirium, abnormal behavior, paranoia, and terror are all common end-stage symptoms. That’s not specifically “aggression”, but it certainly doesn’t seem out of the question that a delirious, terrified paranoid might behave violently. Rabies - Wikipedia
Irritability, hypersensitivity to stimuli, and erratic behavior are commonly manifested in humans. Biting isn’t typical. There may be ranting and raving and other signs of altered mental status, though.
There haven’t been any documented cases of human-to-human rabies transmission (except maybe for one case in Ethiopia a while ago that involved kissing). This strongly suggests that humans fail to reliably exhibit rabies-induced behaviors that promote viral spread, such as biting and other signs of aggression.
Yes. Hypersalivation and hydrophobia are seen in rabid humans as well as most other susceptible species.
I’ve never heard of a modern rabies case in which the victim went on a violent rampage. Most I’ve read about stress that people are also quite ill with high fevers, along with confusion/agitation and other changes in mentation. By the time a rabies patient might strike out against others they’re generally diagnosed and in a hospital. I did find one source (not a strictly medical site) that said the following:
“It is not uncommon for humans to have what is called furious rabies, and these individuals have episodes of agitation. They can have seizures, can thrash out and become very aggressive.”
One account of human rabies written by Berton Roueche talked about a man who had spells of mania while hospitalized with rabies and when he felt an attack coming on would warn those around him.
Slight hijack - I had a debate recently with an antivaccinationist on an online forum about what he’d do if bitten by a rabid dog (bear in mind that dog-to-human rabies has virtually been eliminated by vaccination and that properly administered vaccine in humans after bites is nearly 100% protective). His response was to declare that he wouldn’t get sick and that if he did, “natural” treatments instead of vaccination would work fine. I wonder how many antivaxers would have such confidence if they knew they’d been exposed to a rabid animal.
My mother told me several times about a man in our little hometown who died of rabies when she (my mother) was “just a little girl.” She was born in 1910 so I don’t know her exact age at the time. According to her, the victim had to be tied to his bed with rope towards the end because he would become violent and attempt to attack anyone he could. She always included the ‘fact’ that the man’s screams could be heard “all over town” and “everyone” knew the man was dead when the screams stopped. If my mother was just a little girl, I have no idea how she would know the man had to be restrained so I assume she heard it from others so it may or may not be true. I do know that a member of a family I knew had died of rabies at about the general time my mother said it happened but I can’t vouch for anything else.
On the subject: Zsofia, got a question for ya: Since you work in a liberry, maybe you have access to some some old newspaper accounts of this.
One of the few human rabies deaths in South Carolina occurred in Fairfield county in the early 1950s (1950 at the earliest, 1953 at the latest). It was a two-year-old child (last name possibly “Byrd”), who had been bitten on the face by a rabid dog.
That much I found out from some website that tracked confirmed (human) rabies deaths in the US, but have since lost the link or how I came by it.
What is puzzling to me about this is that I would presume that the child would have started receiving the treatments immediately, since the dog was known to have been rabid. If that had been the case, it would have been about the only documented case of a person having died from rabies after having started PEP before the symptoms started. Just wondering if there might be any old newspaper accounts of it on microsomething. If it wasn’t in “The State,” it might have been in the [Fairfield County] “News and Herald.”
You’re still at risk for rabies if you fail to get immunoglobulin in addition to the multiple vaccine doses. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what had happened, seeing how it’s a fairly common occurence even today (mostly in developing countries).
According to this cite, the use of immunoglobulin didn’t really begin until 1954. So yeah, that kid, even if vaccinated, probably didn’t get what we would consider a complete regimine of PEP.
Rage. Hard to tell, as his character was a hostile curmudgeon even before he was bitten. He never went violently crazy, but near the end of the film was getting that “trapped animal” look.
The film ends with the vehicle he’s in cresting a hill overlooking “The Town” where he can get to a hospital and get the vaccination he needs. It’s strongly implied that the ending is a happy one, but if he were really experiencing symptoms of rabies (as opposed to just being stressed and desperate because he’s in a bus full of screaming kids traveling at 5mph), wouldn’t that mean it was already too late?
I had rabies shots this summer after being bitten by a neighborhood cat. The owner produced a rabies certificate that had expired months before the bite, and the cat had been hanging around outside, in the area I’d seen the rabid fox this spring.
So I had most of the series (they stopped because there’s a shortage of the vaccine nationwide, and the cat was still alive, meaning it could not have had rabies).
I wouldn’t describe myself as aggressive, but I was pretty pissed off.
/www.youtube. com/watch?v=dScdr8Dly4g