My dog died of rabies and it was a mighty painful thing to watch (I put up the whole story here)
I realise this is a 99% fatal disease, but I read that some woman in Brazil actually came down with full-blown rabies, yet survived! How is this possible, and surely she was reduced to a vegetable?
How can such a vicious virus live to replicate? After all, it kills its host and is almost impossible to transmit exept by biting.
Just writing the story of my dog brought back horrible memories; this has to be one of the nastiest diseases known on Earth. Why hasn’t it been eradicated?
“…I read that some woman in Brazil actually came down with full-blown rabies, yet survived! How is this possible, and surely she was reduced to a vegetable?”
According to Jackson et al. writing in the 1 Jan 03 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, “Rabies is a fatal disease in humans, and, to date, the only survivors of the disease have received rabies vaccine before the onset of illness.”
“How can such a vicious virus live to replicate? After all, it kills its host and is almost impossible to transmit exept by biting.”
The length of time an infected host lives is not, by itself, the issue. The key to the survival of an infectious agent is the need for every infection to result, on average in at least one additional infection.
The fact that rabies does kill its host relatively soon after the host becomes infectious and the fact that it is relatively hard to transmit does make it relatively difficult for rabies virus to be passed on. That’s why rabies infection is relatively rare.
“Why hasn’t it been eradicated?”
It has been eradicated in some places, such the Great Britain and Ireland. In other places, it infects wildlife that are hard to vaccinate. It certainly can be controlled. Rabies infections are rare in humans in the United States.
It’s very difficult - impossible, in a practical sense - to eradicate any disease that has animal hosts. YOU try immunizing every wild bat out there. That’s one major reason why smallpox is the only disease that’s been completely eradicated (yeah, I know, except for the few samples left over, yadda yadda yadda).
This is not an answer to the OP. It just triggered a family memory.
At the turn of the last century my Grandfather was a law enforcement officer in Lake Village, Arkansas.
One of the deputies was bitten by a rabid animal (I think it was a skunk).
There was a Pasteur treatment, but it was far away.
What happened next sounds like an Urban Legend, but I’ve never heard of this outside of my family.
My Grandfather and an assistant took the deputy out to a swampy area and chained him to a tree. They watched over him until the disease ran the course.
According to my Mother my Grandfather (her Father) accepted this assignment but left the Sheriff’s service shortly after. .
Hmm. Sounds very much like I book I read once called “Shout at the Devil” (?) in which one of the protagonists was reluctantly chained up after he got rabies–but he didn’t survive.
Watching a human being go through rabies until it “runs its course” would have to be slightly worse than watching a dog, although I understand that these days a human victim is heavily sedated until he lapses into a coma.
I understand the virus wanting the host to bite someone else so it can survive, but it seems to me that this is one of the most diabolical cases of parasitism ever to have struck this earth.
I have a copy of Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss, which in addition to giving herbal cures for rabies ( :dubious: ), reprints an account of a M. Buisson, who presented a paper on his treatment for rabies (then called hydrophobia) before the French Academy of Arts and Sciences. He claims to have cured himself and fourscore other people by subjecting the victims to a “vapour bath” at 140F.:dubious:
Doug Bowe’s story reminded me of one of the stories about my grandfather the policeman. He was a cop back in the 1930s and he and his partner were sent out to put down a rabid dog that was terrorizing a neighborhood. They spotted the dog and pursued it, when my grandfather was able to take a shot at the dog, he did. The bullet missed the dog, ricocheted off the sidewalk and hit my grandfather’s partner in the foot!:eek:
Grandpa didn’t like to talk about that story very much, and I’ve no idea who finally killed the dog.
I’ve read (in some novel, not in a serious book) about a woman catching the rabies and being tied to her bed until her death. So, I’m wondering if this was actually the usual way to handle the victims of rabies.
The first I ever heard of rabies was when I saw the 1974 TV film A Cry In The Wilderness, starring George Kennedy. It scared the wits out of me (well, I was a kid at the time… ).
I had to endure rabies shots and in the course of it read up on the disease quite a bit. When given the choice of taking the shots (which aren’t given in the stomach anymore, but are still not particularly pleasant), and dying of rabies (which is a nasty way to go), I said “Bring on the hypodermic needles.”
As was pointed out, the disease spreads because it doesn’t kill particularly quickly (about a week IIRC). Given that it makes the animal “irrational,” the animal comes into contact with lots of other animals that it would otherwise avoid. Lots of fights, lots of saliva, lots of blood.
I’ve never heard of tying someone to a tree, but there are still several “mad stones” here in VA, usually in County courthouses. The folk-wisdom was that if you got bitten by a rabid animal you had to be taken to a “mad stone” and the stone applied to the wound. They were kept at the Courthouse because they were centrally located. I can’t imagine that they worked, but folk-wisdom is folk-wisdom.
It was my understanding that rabies CAN lay dormant in your body for YEARS before you actually get it.
I think the reason you were chained to your bed, in days of yore, was because it would be harder to pass it on to others.
I had a friend in grade school who was bitten by a raccoon on a class field trip. She had to get the shots. It was very traumatic for me to know she was going through the painful series of shots. I ran into her at a class reunion like 20 years later. She couldn’t believe that I remembered that about her. I had been having nightmares about it all those years.
“It was my understanding that rabies CAN lay dormant in your body for YEARS before you actually get it.”
I don’t believe that’s correct, and I don’t believe I’d want to test the hypothesis to find out. Rabies is a nasty, nasty way to die. The last case write-up I read indicated that if you do contract the disease the doctor’s essentially put you into a coma until you die, just to spare you the trauma of having to let the disease run its course.
It’s my understanding that while it CAN take up to a year to develop, it usually shows itself within two weeks, and also depends where the bite source is. Nearer the head, the quicker you show symptoms.
You can bet your a$$ that mine was a mighty nervous family for two weeks, not to mention everyone at the party . . . they never did come around much any more.
Stay away from bats. And when the gibbering starts, go look for a shotgun.
From what I’ve read these days it’s much easier to die from rabies (massive tranquilizers, or the coma stated above) than it used to be . . . when they chained you down and prayed. But I sure as hell don’t want to find out either! Watching my dog die was close enough for 50 lifetimes.
The horror is compounded when you find out that there are several KINDS of rabies . . . as if we even needed ONE. Apparently, you can have “furious” rabies, or “dumb” rabies. My friggin’ god, I’d hope it would the “dumb” kind . . .
Viz: “Furious rabies is characterized by agitation, thrashing, biting, viciousness, choking, gagging, hyperventilation, cardiac arrhythmias, paralysis and death.”
“Paralytic or dumb rabies is characterized more by paralytic symptoms, which may include apathy, apparent depression, increased blood pressure, tachycardia, confusion, hallucinations, and disorientation. _These symptoms are followed_by increased_periods of hyperactivity,_stiffness in_the_back of the_neck, and an_increase in the_number of_cells_in the_cerebrospinal_fluid. Dumb or paralytic rabies ends with coma and death by respiratory failure.”
Apparently laws had to be enacted to prevent the murder of rabies victims by terrified witnesses.
Also, and more worrisome, is that for people taking chloroquine (an anti-malarial drug) as I believe my whole family would have been at that time in Zaire, the effectiveness of the rabies vaccine was lessened by half!
“One of the more insidious - cruel, even - characteristics of the virus is to infect the brain in such a way as to cause the animal to want to bite, and then to concentrate itself in the salivary glands. This, of course, insures its transmission to a new host.”
This implies a sinister “intelligence” in the virus! If the terrorists knew what they were doing they’d release a mist of “furious” rabies virus over a major city. Sure beats kindly ol’ Uncle Smallpox.
“Also, and more worrisome, is that for people taking chloroquine (an anti-malarial drug) as I believe my whole family would have been at that time in Zaire, the effectiveness of the rabies vaccine was lessened by half!”
Not a problem if you receive the standard rabies preexposure prophylaxis series of three 1-cc intramuscular injections of human diploid cell vaccine. There was a failure of the vaccine when it was given in a series of three 0.1-cc intradermal doses to a woman taking chloroquine. She was bitten by a puppy in Kenya but neglected to tell anyone and died of rabies a few months later.