what is rabies
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Picture this. It’s a warm summer night, your window is open, and somewhere around 3:00 a.m. you half wake to the softest sound in the world, a flutter, like a page turning.
flutter: a quick, light movement 振动；飘动；挥动；颤动
the flutter of wings
翅膀的拍动
with a flutter of her long, dark eyelashes
她那长长的黑睫毛扑闪了一下
(figurative)
to feel a flutter of panic in your stomach
胸中感到一阵恐
A bat, small and panicked, does one confused lap around your bedroom and disappears back into the dark.
lap: one journey from the beginning to the end of a track used for running, etc. （跑道等的）一圈
the fastest lap on record
创纪录的最快的一圈
She has completed six laps.
她跑完六圈了。
He was overtaken on the final lap.
他在最后一圈被超过。
to do a lap of honour (= go around the track again to celebrate winning)
绕场一周庆祝胜利
(NAmE)
to do a victory lap
绕场一周庆祝胜利
You check your arms, nothing, no mark, no blood, no pain. So, you file it [clears throat] away as a funny story for the group chat and go back to sleep. 3 months later, you’re at dinner and a small patch of skin on your forearm
patch: a small area of sth, especially one which is different from the area around it 色斑；斑点；（与周围不同的）小块，小片
a black dog with a white patch on its back
背上有一块白斑的黑狗
a bald patch on the top of his head
他头顶的秃块
damp patches on the wall
墙上的片片湿渍
patches of dense fog
团团浓雾
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starts to tingle. It prickles like static, like the skin is trying to tell you something. You reach for your glass of water, lift it towards your mouth, and your throat slams shut. Your hand starts shaking, and for a reason you couldn’t explain to a single person at that table, you are suddenly deeply afraid of the water. Oh, hey there. Fun fact, that glass of water is the least of your problems. But, before we get to what’s happening with that glass, one question, and be honest with yourself. Which animal do
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you think kills the most people with rabies? I’ll give you 2 to 3 seconds to answer it. >> [music] >> Everyone pictures the same two suspects, a snarling dog with foam dripping off its chin, or a bat.
a mass of very small air bubbles on the surface of a liquid
Link to original
Circular transclusion detected: Lexicon/new-words/foam
And worldwide, the dog people are right. Dogs cause about 99% of all human rabies deaths, roughly 59,000 [music] a year, which works out to one person about every 9 minutes. For comparison, sharks kill five people a year and got an entire week of television out of it. Dogs are out here doing 59,000 and still
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holding a 96% approval rating. Honestly, incredible PR department. But, if you live in the United States, the answer flips, because there, it’s the bat. And here’s the part nobody wants to believe. Bat teeth are so small that the bite often leaves no mark you’d ever find. No blood, no pain, nothing. Which means the sentence, “I checked, it didn’t bite me.” has quietly become some of the most expensive last words in American medical history. Oh, and in case you filed rabies away with the old-timey diseases,
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somewhere between scurvy and the plague, it kills more people every year than sharks, bears, wolves, spiders, and snakes. Actually, no, not snakes. Snakes are monsters. Snakes kill way more. Forget the snakes. But, you get the idea. rabies never went anywhere. It’s just patient. Anyway, back to your forearm. Actually, hold that thought about your forearm for a minute. Because before this story goes anywhere, you need to understand what’s actually in there. rabies is a virus. And a virus,
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at its core, is barely even a thing. It’s a microscopic capsule with a strip of genetic code inside. Basically, a USB stick loaded with malware. On its own, it can’t move, can’t eat, can’t grow, can’t do anything. It only becomes dangerous when it gets plugged into a living cell. Then the malware runs, your cell drops its normal job, and turns into a copy machine, printing thousands of new viruses until it burns out. That’s the entire business model of every virus on Earth. The only real
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difference between them is which cells they hijack. The flu wants your airways, stomach bugs want your gut. rabies wants exactly one thing, and it happens to be the most protected object in your body, your brain. The virus itself is shaped, genuinely, [music] like a tiny bullet, and it lives in the saliva of infected mammals, dogs, bats, raccoons, foxes, skunks. When one of them bites, the saliva goes into the wound, and the bullet gets delivered into your muscle. And this is the exact moment rabies
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stops behaving like any virus you’ve ever had. A normal virus jumps into your bloodstream, the body’s highway system, that fast. But, the highway is patrolled. Your immune system spots the intruder, learns its face, and usually wins. rabies skips the highway entirely. It docks onto the nearest nerve ending, and slips inside your nervous system, the body’s electrical wiring. And your nerves have a property almost nothing else in your body has. They’re a closed, protected network that [music] your
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immune system barely monitors. No fever, no swollen glands, not a single antibody gets made. The alarm never goes off because the burglar is crawling through the one set of tunnels that has no cameras. The destination makes it worse. Your brain sits behind something called the blood-brain barrier, a security filter so strict it blocks most medicines, most poisons, and even most of your own immune cells from ever getting in. It is the most secure building in your body. Brilliant design with one catastrophic flaw. If an
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intruder does get inside, your defenses can’t follow it in. And that right there is the entire reason rabies is the deadliest infection known to medicine. Not because it’s fast or aggressive, because it’s headed somewhere your body cannot defend. Once it arrives, it doesn’t eat your brain or punch holes in it the way people imagine. It does something quieter. The infection inflames the entire brain. Doctors call that encephalitis and starts scrambling the systems that run you in the
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background. Swallowing, fear, temperature, heartbeat, breathing. Nobody dies of a rabies wound. You die because one by one the operating system fails. That’s the monster. Humans have known it for 4,000 years. It shows up in Babylonian law codes and its name is just Latin for to rage. And in all that time, the plot has never changed. A bite, a long quiet wait, then a week of madness, and then death. Okay, now back to your forearm because now you can actually see what’s happening in there.
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The bat’s saliva delivered a few of those bullet-shaped viruses into your arm. They docked onto a nerve and they’ve been climbing it toward your head ever since at a pace of roughly 1 mm per hour. Man, even your Amazon packages move faster. For most people, the climb takes 1 to 3 months, in a few documented cases, years. And the entire time there is nothing to feel and nothing to find. No cameras in the tunnels, remember? But those quiet months are the most important stretch of this whole video, so lock this in. While
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the virus is still in transit, it is completely beatable. Because for exactly this window, a treatment exists. A round of shots you get after the bite, a rabies vaccine, plus one extra injection. And those shots don’t improve your chances. They win close to 100% of the time. Here’s how. The vaccine is a wanted poster. It shows your immune system the virus’s face using harmless dead copies. So, your body builds antibodies and ambushes the real thing while it’s still on the road. The extra
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injection, called immunoglobulin, is even simpler. Pre-made antibodies delivered straight into the wound area. You’re not training your own army. You’re renting a finished one. But the moment the virus crosses the blood-brain barrier, the window shuts. Behind that wall, no drug can reach it and no immune cell can chase it. Out of the millions of people rabies has killed across recorded history, the number of confirmed survivors after symptoms began is fewer than 20. Not 20%, 20 human beings ever. One of them, a teenager in
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Wisconsin, made it in 2004 after doctors shut her brain down into a deep coma and hoped. That same trick has been tried many times since, and it almost never works again. So, rabies ends up being unique on this channel. The only killer we’ve covered that hands you a month’s long head start and then wins almost exclusively against people who didn’t use it. Which brings us to the day the head start runs out. One thing before we go there, because this trips everyone up. rabies runs on two completely
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different clocks. The waiting clock runs in months. That was the climb to your brain. The dying clock starts the moment the virus reaches the brain, and it runs in days. Everything that follows now fits inside about a week and a half. The first sign is almost poetic. The old bite site, healed, invisible, forgotten for 3 months, starts to tingle. Prickling, itching, a strange crawling burn right at the scar. That’s the virus reporting in along the exact nerve it used as an entrance. The call is coming
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from inside the house, and the house is your arm. Doctors consider that tingle one of the most ominous single symptoms in all of medicine, because it means the journey is over. It arrives bundled with what feels precisely like the flu. Fever, headache, exhaustion, which is the problem because 99 out of 100 people respond to flu plus a weird tingle with a paracetamol and an early night. Within a day or two, the encephalitis sets in and the brain starts glitching. Anxiety shows up out of nowhere and refuses to
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explain itself. Thoughts get foggy and confusion rolls in and out in waves. And then comes the famous one, hydrophobia. Movies get this wrong, so here’s what it actually is. The inflamed brain scrambles the swallowing reflex and every attempt to drink now triggers violent, extremely painful spasms of the throat and diaphragm like a full body cramp centered on your windpipe. The brain only needs one or two of those experiences to learn the lesson, water equals choking. From then on, the sight
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of a glass, the sound of a tap, eventually the mere thought of drinking is enough to set off panic. [music] You now react to a glass of water the way Superman reacts to kryptonite. And meanwhile, this might be the cruelest sentence in this entire video, the thirst never goes away. The body keeps begging for the one thing the brain now refuses to allow. And why would a virus do something that theatrical? Because it’s not a glitch, it’s the business model. rabies spreads through saliva. A
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host that can’t swallow is a host with a mouth full of virus. Add the confusion and the agitation and you’ve got a creature that’s aggressive, drooling, and inclined to bite. Sound familiar? Every zombie movie you’ve ever watched is basically rabies fan fiction. This is the closest thing that exists to a real zombie virus and it’s been running the same playbook for 4,000 years. A few days deeper, in roughly 80% of cases, it escalates into what doctors call furious rabies. Agitation, thrashing,
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hallucinations, bursts of aggression, and hypersalivation, which is where foaming at the mouth comes from. It isn’t rage, it’s saliva with nowhere to go. By now, even a breeze across the face can trigger the spasms, a symptom with its own name, aerophobia, fear of moving air. The other 20% get the paralytic form instead, quieter, no fury, the body simply shutting down limb by limb. And woven through all of it are the lucid windows, the detail that separates rabies from almost every other
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death on this channel. Patients keep surfacing. For minutes at a time, the confusion clears completely and they’re fully themselves, able to talk, recognize their family, and understand exactly what’s happening and exactly how it ends. Then, the spasms return and the window closes again. The people in those hospital rooms never forget the windows. Neither do the doctors. In the final days, the autonomic system, heartbeat, temperature, blood pressure, [music] all the background software, fails.
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Temperature spikes, the heart races and stumbles, and everything slides into a coma. From there, the breathing centers in the brain stem shut down and the heart [music] stops. From the bite to the first symptom, months. From the first symptom to the end, usually less [music] than 10 days. So, what does rabies feel like from the inside? For 3 months, it feels like nothing, like being completely fine, which is exactly the trap. Then, it feels like a mild flu with a strangely chatty scar. And then, it becomes the
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deepest betrayal the human body can run. Your own brain, the thing watching this video with you right now, gets turned against you. It takes your thirst hostage, floods you with fear that has no target, and keeps handing you clear-eyed minutes, apparently just so you can fully appreciate the situation. Getting buried alive at least locks you in a box you can understand. rabies locks you inside your own head, loses the key, and then stops by the window every few hours to check on you. I rank a lot of terrible exits on this channel.
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This one sits comfortably in the top three. Now, how worried should you actually be? And for once, the honest answer is exactly as worried as your zip code. rabies kills those 59,000 people a year almost entirely in places where the dogs aren’t vaccinated and the shots are hard to reach. Mostly across Africa and Asia, and heartbreakingly often kids. In In United States, it’s one to three deaths a year. Almost every single one traced back to a bat, and almost every single one wearing some version of the
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same story. Nobody thought the bat had actually bitten them. The vaccine, by the way, has existed since 1885. Louis Pasteur tested it on a 9-year-old named Joseph Meister, who’d been bitten 14 times by a rabid dog and was considered as good as gone. The shots worked, the kid lived, and medicine changed forever. So, this is not an unsolved problem. Every rabies death since 1885 has been a delivery issue, not a science issue. And now the part to actually remember, because rabies comes with the single
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most effective saving method of any death I’ve ever covered, it’s just sitting on a timer. If anything wild bites or scratches you, or a dog you don’t know, first, wash the wound. Soap and running water, a full 15 minutes. It feels excessive, it isn’t. It physically flushes virus out before the climb begins. Then that same day, a doctor or an ER for the post-exposure shots. Not next week, not if it looks infected. Same day, because the shots win essentially every time when they start
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before symptoms and never after. Then there’s the bat rule, especially in America. Waking up with a bat in the room means getting the shots, full stop, no visible bite required. You already know their teeth don’t leave receipts. And but I feel fine means nothing here. For the first 3 months, rabies feels exactly like being perfectly healthy. That’s the whole trick. There’s nothing to notice, which is why you go by what happened, not by how you feel. So, let’s land this one, because there’s a strange
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comfort buried in it. Most deaths on this channel come down to bad luck. This one doesn’t. rabies is the deadliest infection we know of, and the most preventable one at the same time, which means [music] the entire fight happens in one single moment. Something bites you, and a small voice in your head says, “Eh, it’s probably nothing.” That voice has a body count of 59,000 a year. Don’t let it drive. And if anything flutters through your bedroom window tonight, well, now you know exactly what
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to do. If you like this video, subscribe and I see you in the next one. Oh, and if you want to support the channel, you can also subscribe to my Patreon. Over and out, Mr. Death.