How To Rid the World of Rabies
Most dog owners have no doubt heard about the horrors of rabies, an infection that’s usually transmitted through dog bites. The bullet-shaped virus begins replicating, quietly, in a dog’s muscle. Then it travels to motor neurons in the central nervous system, and eventually reaches the brain. It wreaks inflammatory havoc there, leading the dog to become confused and extremely aggressive. Then the virus travels through the dog’s peripheral nervous system to the salivary glands. There it makes its host foam at the mouth, leaving the virus fully exposed, in perfect position to infect the next piece of muscle the crazed animal bites into.
The scariest thing about rabies is its potency: If your dog gets rabies, your dog will almost certainly die. And if a rabid dog bites you, you will almost certainly die, too, unless you get a vaccine within 10 days.
And yet, rabies isn’t a problem in developed countries. Last year exactly one person was diagnosed with rabies in the United States (after being bitten in Guatemala), and nobody got it in Western Europe. There’s a very simple explanation for our lack of rabies: We vaccinate our dogs.
That’s not wholly true, of course; some dog owners don’t get their pups the vaccine and some dogs don’t have owners. But in the state of New York, where I live, the law dictates that “every dog, cat and domesticated ferret” be vaccinated. The same goes for most other states.
In developing countries the situation is sadly quite different, as I learned in a commentary published in today’s issue of Science. There, rabies kills at least 69,000 people every year (and because of underreporting, the real number may be many times higher than that). Some 40 percent of victims are children. Rabies in people is a lot like rabies in dogs: It causes confusion, hyperactivity, excessive drooling, and delusions. The new commentary opens with a gut-wrenching photograph of a 16-year-old boy suffering through rabies; he is lying on a pillow with his eyes closed, biting down hard on a wooden stick, with three people holding him down.
Read more at...Only Human, September 2014.