Like any curious pup, the second Arnie encounters hedging/bushes/shrubbery, his first instinct is to dive right in in the hopes of flushing out some yummy yummy bunnies/kittens/boars.
Like any over-protective owner, I run after him screaming “GET OUTTA THERE YER GUNNA GET BITTEN BY A SNAKE!!!”
Cause when you start poking your nose in places you arent supposed to be– you dont always find yummy squirrels. Sometimes you flush out bad things… like rabies infected vampire bats. Thats exactly what logging/mining expeditions in Venezuela have done. Theyve displaced colonies of vampire bats… vampire bats infected with rabies… vampire bats that are now biting humans. Thus in the past year, 38 Warao Indians have died from rabies, half of those within the past couple of months, as youve probably read in the news.
If you get bitten by a wild mammal (rabies can only infect mammals), assume that it is rabid. You cant afford to ‘wait and see’, because after rabies infection gets to the point where you are showing symptoms, its in your brain, and its too late to treat. But while it can take a long time (few days to a few months) after a bite to get ‘rabies’, its not because rabies goes ‘latent’. The silent period is just a side effect of rabies life-cycle, and it just so happens thats what makes rabies treatable.
- Infected animal carries rabies viruses in its saliva. It bites you on, say, the leg. Viruses enter your leg muscle cells and replicate. The viruses move into the sensory nerves in your leg (the nerves that say ‘OMFG I JUST GOT BITTEN BY A RABID ANIMAL OOOOOOWWWW’)
- The viruses move to your legs dorsal ganglia and replicate some more
- Viruses get into your spinal cord, use it as a highway to your brain
- Viruses infect your brain stem and cerebellum, and takes over your behaviors
- Virus spreads to your eyes, nose, and most importantly, salivary glands
- Youre crazy and can go bite someone else and infect them
We figured out you could stop rabies through animal experimentation way back in 1887– If you infected a rat in the foot, then cut its sciatic nerve, rabies infection never progressed and the mouse didnt die. They also figured out that you could wait a few days, up to three weeks, before severing the nerve, and the animal would still survive. So, if you can clear the viral infection before it travels to the spinal cord, you prevent it from infecting the brain, thus prevent the viral encephalitis that ultimately kills someone with ‘rabies’.
So, if you get bitten by an mammal, the first thing they do is give you a rabies vaccine. Youll get four more over the next few weeks to really piss your immune system off, kicking it into high-gear so it can (hopefully) overtake the infection. Lots of B-cells pumping out antibodies, lots of cytotoxic T-cells honed-in on killing rabies infected cells.
Initially, you also get a dose of anti-rabies antibodies to tide you over until your own immune system reacts to the vaccine and can take over (its not a good long-term treatment due to serum sickness, and your own immune system will take over just fine, unless youre immuno-compromised).
If you get treated early, rabies isnt a death sentence. And, in Venezuela they are starting to vaccinate at-risk humans, distributing mosquito nets to keep vampire bats away from sleeping people, and deploying med-boats to remote areas. So this recent rabies outbreak is unfortunate, but controllable.
But the next virus we flush out of the forest… what if its not ‘just rabies’…?