Rabies Kills 189 People Every Day. Here's Why You Never Hear About It.

This article is part of HuffPost’s Project Zero campaign, a yearlong series on neglected tropical diseases and efforts to fight them. Rabies is one of the most lethal viruses known to man. It kills virtually 100 percent of victims who don’t get the vaccine. Today, there is both the knowledge and the practical means to eradicate the disease, but it still causes 69,000 deaths worldwide every year. That’s 189 people a day. Rabies is transmitted to humans by the bite of an infected animal, usually a dog. After infection, it typically takes between one and three months for a person to show symptoms. By the time they do, their death is inevitable.  From the onset of symptoms, the end is swift but terrifying. The victim’s brain swells, causing rising anxiety that turns into hallucinations and later full-blown delirium. In 1885, the French biologist Louis Pasteur administered a dose of an experimental vaccine to a 9-year old boy who’d been mauled by a rabid dog. The boy became the first known human to survive the virus. Pasteur’s vaccine, which contained the dried spinal cord of an infected rabbit, predated any modern understanding of viruses and was very different from the vaccines based on inactivated tissue culture that we use today.  Studies have shown that eliminating rabies would be cost-effective. The disease results in an estimated $8.6 billion of economic losses annually, but eliminating it in Africa ...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news