#Rabies #IncurableDisease #WhyIsRabiesFatal
Rabies is a viral disease that is almost always fatal once symptoms appear and is notoriously difficult to cure. This deadly virus is a significant public health threat in many parts of the world, especially in developing countries where it is endemic. Understanding what specifically makes rabies so incurable and fatal is crucial in efforts to find effective treatments and prevent its spread.
🦠What is rabies?
Rabies is a viral disease that affects the nervous system of mammals, including humans. It is typically spread through the saliva of an infected animal, most commonly through a bite. Once the virus enters the body, it travels through the peripheral nerves to the brain and spinal cord, where it causes inflammation and ultimately leads to severe and often fatal neurological symptoms.
🔬 Why is rabies so difficult to cure?
The unique characteristics of the rabies virus contribute to its status as an incurable and fatal disease. Here are some key factors that make rabies particularly challenging to treat:
1. Neurotropism:
Rabies virus has a strong affinity for nerve cells, which allows it to quickly and efficiently invade the central nervous system. Once the virus reaches the brain, it causes irreversible damage that is extremely difficult to reverse. This neurotropism makes it challenging for medications to reach and target the virus without causing significant harm to the infected individual.
2. Lack of effective antiviral drugs:
There are currently no approved antiviral drugs that are specifically designed to target the rabies virus. While some experimental treatments have shown promise in animal studies, there is a lack of effective medications that can effectively combat the virus in humans.
3. Rapid progression of symptoms:
Once clinical symptoms of rabies appear, the disease progresses rapidly and is almost always fatal. This rapid progression leaves little time for intervention or treatment, further complicating efforts to develop effective therapies for rabies.
4. Inability to reach the brain:
The blood-brain barrier serves as a protective barrier that prevents many medications and immune cells from reaching the brain. This barrier makes it challenging for potential rabies treatments to effectively target the virus in the central nervous system, limiting the effectiveness of potential interventions.
🔎 Why can’t we find a cure for rabies?
The search for a cure for rabies is a complex and ongoing challenge, with several factors contributing to the difficulty of developing effective treatments.
1. Limited funding and resources:
Rabies primarily affects underserved populations in developing countries, where limited resources and infrastructure hinder research efforts and access to potential treatments. The lack of financial incentives for pharmaceutical companies to invest in rabies research further compounds the challenges in developing a cure.
2. Complex nature of the virus:
The rabies virus is highly adaptable and can evolve rapidly, making it difficult to develop a single effective treatment that can target all strains of the virus. This complexity adds additional hurdles to finding a cure for rabies.
3. Priority of preventive measures:
Public health efforts to control rabies primarily focus on animal vaccination and post-exposure prophylaxis for humans, which have been effective in preventing the spread of the virus. While these preventive measures are crucial, they may divert resources and attention away from the development of specific antiviral treatments for rabies.
In conclusion, the incurability and fatality of rabies can be attributed to the unique characteristics of the virus, the lack of effective antiviral treatments, and the complex challenges involved in finding a cure. Efforts to combat rabies continue to focus on preventive measures, research into novel treatment strategies, and addressing the socioeconomic factors that contribute to the burden of the disease. While finding a cure for rabies remains a formidable challenge, ongoing research and global cooperation give hope for potential breakthroughs in the future.
The short answer is that rabies attacks the brain, causing [encephalitis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis), which is extremely hard for a human to live through. If you want to know more about *exactly* what goes on, look up the type of encephalitis (called [meningoencephalitis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meningoencephalitis)).
When you think about diseases, most humans tend to think about disease in the same way as a common cold. They think about exposure, then a part of the body making a virus, then the body reacting. That *isn’t* how rabies works. Instead, rabies works like tanks rolling across a country’s border & spreading along the roads, eventually reaching the capital city. Rabies is an R.N.A.-based virus rather than a D.N.A.-based one, which makes it able to spread more quickly. [When an animal bites you the virus actually attacks the nerves near the bite, then spreads directly up the nerves](https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.virusres.2005.04.004). Eventually the virus (the attacking tanks) get to the brain (city). That is where rabies becomes lethal. Like an army invading they start to do what they want (burning down things & breaking things as they go). The human brain actually uses comas against some diseases as a way to defend its self. Many rabies-infected humans go into a coma in the later stages, as the infection increasingly damages their brain. The process of the virus spreading takes a while, & you don’t get symptoms for a long while, so **humans that are bitten by any mammal need to get treatment from a physician with a rabies vaccine, just in case.**
Most animals can survive for a while with their brain being attacked, but they don’t usually have a natural coma response, & they don’t have a doctor to put them in an artificial coma. Instead an animal stays active with the parts of the brain that are still functioning. In practice this means the animal reverts into an aggressive & irrational state. While brain-damaged the animal does things that are based on more primitive parts of their thinking, like fearing fire, fearing drowning, & trying to interact with everything by eating it. One unusual detail about the rabies virus is that it also seeks out & attacks the nerves that let you swallow, so if an infected human or animal survive long enough they could die of thirst before they die from the brain damage.
One problem with advanced cases in humans is that the person is walking around doing irrational things, so human patients are sometimes put into a coma to keep them from intentionally hurting themselves as well. If someone is kept awake they actually suffer from some of the same effects animals do, such as fear of water. Some variants of rabies also cause irrational violence, even in humans. Anecdotally, I’ve heard of patients in quarantines attacking *themselves*, but I didn’t find any citation for that when I looked. According to the World Health Organization [most human cases result in a death unless they’re treated before symptoms progress to that point](https://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs099/en).
Hope this helped!