On July 27, 2020, somewhere in the leafy suburbs
of Minnesota, a man woke up in the middle of the night to what can only be described
as a Count Dracula moment. A bat was in his bedroom, screeching and biting
into his hand. What’s more, this furry, fanged thug was
rabid, which might explain why it attacked an innocent man in his bed. As this show will reveal, this guy was now
in for the experience of a lifetime, a viral nightmare of terrifying proportions that only
a disease like rabies can provide. Rabies, folks, is no joke. Where pathogens are concerned, it’s without
doubt the GOAT. From stray dogs transmitting this deadly deases
to American organ transplant receivers and innocent churchgoers, rabies is everywhere,
and it takes no prisoners. It’s the worst, and you’ll agree with
us in about 20 minutes. We’re going to come back to the fate of
the man involved in the bedroom bat attack soon, but first, we need to give you a rabies
101 class to help you better understand what might happen if one day you get on the wrong
side of a rabid animal. Follow our advice, and we promise you you’ll
be fine. The good news is the chance of getting rabies
is very slim for most people, but the bad news is if you do get it and you don’t manage
it properly, you’re going to have the worst experience of your life before it finally
takes your life. Rabies is a boss-level virus in terms of the
case fatality rate. If rabies becomes symptomatic, you pretty
much have a 100% percent chance of dying. Some sources say 99%, but as you’ll see
with our final rabies real-life story, it’s more like 99.99%. In short, you are going to die if you show
signs of being infected. Even smallpox, which is one hell of a nasty
pathogen, only had about a three in ten chance of killing someone when it was still around
in the 20th century. Sure, it wiped out about 300 million people
from 1900 until it was eradicated in the 1970s, but in terms of its deadliness, it couldn’t
hold a light to rabies. Even the scary Ebola and Marburg viruses only
have, on average, about a 50% fatality rate. The good thing about rabies, and today we
won’t say many good things about rabies, is that if it’s detected early on, right
after contact with the diseased animal, it’s highly survivable. That’s good to know since you can find rabies
in around 150 nations and territories in the world. More good news for most of Western Europe,
Australia, and Japan, is you won’t find rabid dogs, and dogs are a big spreader of
rabies. As for the USA, each year, 60 to 70 dogs and
at least 250 cats are reported to be rabid. More good news for Westerners is that 95%
of human rabies deaths happen in Asia and Africa. We don’t have the exact number of rabies
deaths every year, but we do know that back in 1990, when people in the US were dancing
to MC Hammer’s hit tune U Can’t Touch This, 54,000 people in the world made the
mistake of letting themselves be touched by a rabid animal’s teeth. The CDC says these days, the death toll from
rabies is still in the tens of thousands, likely anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 a year. It’s hard to know the exact numbers as the
WHO says it doesn’t have the data for some countries. Many rabies deaths are unreported and sometimes
blamed on something else. You might find an odd rabies death in the
UK, but that’s usually a result of someone going abroad, such as the 2018 case of a British
man dying horribly after a cat bit him on his vacation in Morocco. We’ll tell you about some similar vacation
nightmares featuring Americans later. Britain actually had its first homemade rabies
death in 100 years in 2002 when a bat bit a Scottish guy. The country that is king of rabies is India. In a recent report, the WHO estimated that
between 18,000 to 20,000 rabies deaths occur in India every year but said the number could
be much higher. You also find a lot of rabies cases in China,
as well as parts of Southeast Asia. The WHO says accurate data is hard to come
by, but India is certainly the world leader. As for countries in Africa, again, the data
isn’t always complete, but in 2015, there were 5,600 reported rabies cases in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo alone. A separate study we found on rabies in Africa
detailed the countries of Algeria, Namibia, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Tunisia, Uganda,
Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The study was startling, to say the least. The number of rabies cases in these nations
was anywhere from just 62 to as high as 563, but the death rate was at the very lowest,
32.8%, and at the highest, 94%. The 94% country was Namibia, which has 269
cases. That’s a hell of a lot of deaths considering
rabies is treatable. We won’t get too bogged down in data. You just need to know that rabies is a serious
business in parts of Asia and Africa. The reason is two-fold. But before we go into those reasons, we have
a question for you that isn’t rabies related. Is something interfering with your happiness
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this channel. But as we were saying about rabies in Asia
and Africa. The reason it's still such serious business
there is two-fold. First, 99% of human rabies cases on these
continents are caused by someone coming into contact with a rabid dog. Much of the world doesn’t have rabid dogs
these days or, like the US, has very few of them because dogs are mainly pets, and they
get vaccinated. 99% of human rabies cases on these continents
are caused by someone coming into contact with a rabid dog. Much of the world doesn’t have rabid dogs
these days or, like the US, has very few of them because dogs are mainly pets, and they
get vaccinated. A country such as the US has a widespread
vaccination program, but you don’t see many street dogs there, whereas if you go to a
country like Sierra Leone, you might bump into one of the estimated 500,000 strays. Head to Thailand, and stray dogs walk up and
down the beach like they own the place. In India, stray dogs, a total of 60 million
of them, are part of the furniture on the street. It would be hard to vaccinate them all since
they keep multiplying. The second reason why so many people die of
rabies on these continents is people might not have easy access to the rabies shot if
they live in a very far-off rural area. It also should be said that in both Asia and
Africa, 40% of the rabies deaths are of children under 15. That’s because kids are either not able
to defend themselves against dogs, or like many kids do, they’ll walk right up to a
zombified-looking pooch in the street and give it a slap on the head. So, the vast majority of rabies cases are
from dogs in these continents, but also on the list of rabid animals that have bitten
someone are the cat, jackal, rat, monkey, donkey, horse, pig, rabbit, kudu, goat, cattle,
eland, hyaena, and the short-tempered, tough as old boots honey badger. In the US, it’s a totally different matter,
as it is in most Western nations. Since the street dog population is small to
non-existent, it’s not dogs you have to worry about. Like the guy in the intro, it’s wild animals
that are the main cause of someone getting rabies. Many cases of rabies deaths reported annually
in the US usually involve bats, but other contenders are cattle, wolves, mongoose, coyotes,
raccoons, skunks, and foxes. Of the US deaths that have happened over the
years, seven out of ten were from bats, and that was on home soil. Later we’ll show how traveling Americans
have sometimes stroked the wrong animal. All warm-blooded mammals can get rabies, but
as we said, it’s the street dogs that are the main culprits in the continents of Asia
and Africa. You can’t get rabies from a fish, a bird,
an insect, or a snake. It’s also extremely uncommon in small mammals,
such as mice, squirrels, rats, or hamsters. Rabbits don’t get it often, either. Before any of you Americans watching this
reach for your gun and go bat hunting, you should know that you’re probably safe. About 60,000 Americans each year get what’s
called a post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), aka, the rabies shot. We’ll also talk about this later, as there
are a lot of myths going around about this supposedly horrendous shot, making it sound
like medieval torture. News flash, it’s not. Whether you’re in Jaipur, Johannesburg,
Jacksonville, or John o'Groats, you probably want to know how to avoid rabies. Firstly, for all of you viewers who live where
stray dogs are common, the first step to avoiding rabies is not stroking or slapping the local
hood dogs when they look sick. But how do you know if an animal is sick with
rabies? The good thing about mammals is they tend
to show how they’re feeling, unlike, say, a caterpillar or a cockroach. Rabid mammals tend to act and look strange. You might have heard that they become a bit
bitey, which can be true, but it’s not always the case. And sure, they might foam at the mouth or
drool, but again, that’s not always the case. Sometimes they will become timid or move slower,
which is a different type of rabies. Once they’re acting very lethargic or becoming
unusually angry, the symptoms are already showing. There’s an incubation period with rabies,
which in most cases is somewhere between two weeks to four months but has been known to
be as long as a year. It all depends on how close the bite is to
the brain and spinal cord. When the virus reaches the nervous tissue,
things can start to get weird. It also depends on how severe the bite is
and how much of the virus got through. We keep saying “bite” because bites usually
spread rabies, although, in rare cases, something else might do it. Rabies is spread through the saliva, so the
chances of saliva getting into an open scratch without a bite is very low, but not impossible. We suggest if you have an open wound or a
scratch, you don’t let a crazy-looking street dog, or any street dog for that matter, take
a good old lick of it. As you’ll see soon, the virus can also get
up your nose or in your eyes. A rabid animal most likely to bite you or
try to bite you has what’s called Furious Rabies. This is when the animal is very excitable
and aggressive and might even start eating stones or chewing on car tires. There’s also Dumb Rabies. Dumb rabies is when the animal suffers from
progressive paralysis. Its face will distort, and swallowing will
become hard. The animal might look like it’s had a stroke,
it will become uncoordinated, and then it will die. So, rather than growling at you and getting
mad at you, it might just cower away in a corner as its body slowly breaks down. If you see a dog in the street in this condition,
stay away, or better still, report it. We found an article in an English-language
magazine in Thailand in which a doctor at the Veterinarian Bureau of Animal Hygiene
in Chiang Mai said if you see a dog in the street that looks rabid, “Just cut off its
head and bring it to us.” Here at the Infographics Show, we’d say
this is a tad excessive. Still, the doctor in Thailand knew what rabies
in humans looked like, so you can understand why he was perhaps so hardcore. If you do get bitten by a stray dog or a wild
animal, the first port of call is to wash the bite with soap and water right away. This might save you, but you should still
see a doctor. It will then be decided if you need a rabies
vaccination. The faster you get to a professional, the
better. Remember, when the symptoms show, you aint
ever going back to watching Infographics Show videos again. While the virus is still in the incubation
period, there is hope for you. Even so, if you want the utmost safety, you
should get the shot within 24 hours, or at least 72 hours, of you being bitten just to
be totally safe. The longer you wait, the higher the risk. Ok, let’s now talk about the shot. In the past, it wasn’t pleasant. Rabies medication normally consisted of around
21 shots with a fairly long needle into the stomach. That was decades ago, though. Nowadays, you’ll get four vaccinations,
or maybe five for immunocompromised people, plus you’ll be given some human rabies immune
globulin. The shots will come at intervals, day 0, 3,
7, and 14, and day 28 if required. They might hurt a little bit, just like any
vaccine, but side effects are pretty rare and are usually only headache, nausea, or
in very rare cases, fever, joint pain, or hives. Basically, there’s no need to fear the shot. As we said, it would be ideal to get it as
soon as possible, but some sources say it can be 100% effective if given within ten
days. The problem is most people who get bitten
dress the wound themselves and only turn up at the hospital when it's too late. Now comes the scarier part of the show. Rabies is not a whole lot of fun in terms
of the gazillion things that can happen to a victim. The virus, usually passed through the saliva
of an animal, will enter the body, most often through a wound, and then make its way to
the central nervous system from the nerves, aka the peripheral nervous system. It then travels like a time bomb into the
brain and causes encephalitis and, in some cases, an inflamed spinal cord. In both cases, you will soon cease to exist
if you let it get that far. The strange thing is, while this process may,
as well told you, take days or weeks, it’s been known to take years. So, some people might have walked around normally
for years and then suddenly come down with rabies, probably thinking, “Damn, I knew
I should have gotten that bite seen to.” We found an academic paper whose first line
in the abstract was, “We report a case of rabies viral encephalitis in a 48-year-old
male with an unusually long incubation period, historically suspected to be more than 20
years.” This was in Goa, India. The man turned up at the hospital in a delirious
state, averse to light, water, and air. He died a few hours later. This poor guy was a dog lover. It’s thought he came into contact with rabies
around 25 years before he showed symptoms when he took two mangled street dog corpses
off the street and gave them a proper burial. While blood is not infectious, he was somehow
exposed to the dogs’ infectious tissue. The CDC says infectious material can be “tears,
nervous tissue, saliva, and respiratory tract fluids.” This was a very unusual case, although the
paper also talked about a Vietnamese girl who went to live in Australia and died of
rabies she’d got in Vietnam 6.5 years earlier. We found more literature on rabies that told
us the incubation period is up to 30 days in 30% of the cases, 31 to 90 days in 54%
of cases, more than 90 days in 15% of cases, and in only 1% of the cases more than a year. Now let’s talk about the symptoms in humans. The first stages are just a general crappy
feeling, like a cold or a flu. If you have a wound, it might burn, itch,
tingle, or feel numb. Things soon get worse. Just like an animal, you might become very
excitable. You might hallucinate. You might develop a fear of water (hydrophobia),
a part of the delirium related to a fear of swallowing. Just the thought of water can make the throat
convulse in violent spasms. This might also cause you to have a fear of
air and wind (aerophobia); a light breeze could cause painful spasms. You could become aggressive. This is why you might be tied down. It doesn’t mean you’re angry. You’re just confused. Rabies affects the parts of the brain responsible
for controlling behavior. And yes, it’s possible to froth at the mouth. Saliva production increases with rabies. Why? Because the virus wants to survive and prosper,
with more saliva, it can more easily be passed on. After all that, you’ll likely die of cardio-respiratory
arrest. The first phase of symptoms called the prodromal
phase, can last 2 to 10 days, which then turns into the acute neurologic period, which also
lasts 2 to 10 days. So, this nightmare is often quite prolonged. You’ll wish you were dead if, indeed, you’re
brain is functioning enough to be able to make a wish. What we just described was you getting furious
rabies, but you might also get the human version of dumb rabies, which might also be called
paralytic rabies. Paralytic rabies is not as nightmarish. You just gradually become paralyzed like a
Duracell Bunny that’s run down its battery. An academic paper in Thailand described a
man with this sort of rabies. It said, “He had a stiff neck, generalized
muscle weakness (muscle power grade IV in upper limbs and grade III in lower limbs)
with hyporeflexia [decreased or absent reflex response] of both knee and ankle jerks, and
loose anal sphincter tone.” These symptoms gradually worsened, and he
died. Slowly but surely, your whole body goes limp,
and then you enter a coma and die. We think this sounds much more preferable
to furious rabies, but as luck would have it, only 20% of humans get the dumb kind. Furious rabies also has a kind of positive
effect on some people, although it’s debatable if you’d enjoy it. With furious rabies in humans, there have
been rare cases of hypersexual behavior in men. This has something to do with how rabies affects
the limbic system of the brain. A paper in the National Institutes of Health
said the victims showed “increased sexual desire, involuntary erections, and in some
reports continuous orgasms occurring at a rate of one per hour.” Talk about going out on your shield! Let’s now have a look at some more individual
cases that cover a wider spectrum of causes and symptoms. In 2009, a paper was published in the US that
talked about a 48-year-old Vietnamese male construction worker who went to a hospital
in Hanoi, Vietnam. At first, he felt pain and numbness in both
forearms and a flushing sensation all over his body. He was sweating a lot and felt really, really
horny. You should now know that this guy has about
0.1 chance of surviving. He soon started having muscle spasms when
he saw water or felt a breeze. Tick-tock went the clock of life, but there
was something pretty amazing about this guy’s case. In the same paper, there was the case of a
37-year-old Vietnamese farmer who went to the hospital sweating like hell. He was also scared of water and breezes and
had regular muscle spasms, but at that time, he was lucid and talking. The thing is, with these two guys, there were
no puncture marks on the skin, and the men were lucid enough to tell doctors they had
not been bitten by dogs or wild animals, not ever, as far as they could tell. But get this, patient one had two months before
he was admitted “butchered and consumed a dog.” Canine karma had seemingly breached this man’s
mortal defenses. The paper added:
“The patient took the dog's carcass home, where he first extracted all the teeth with
a knife. He mentioned he did this as a preventive measure
against rabies, as he was aware of the presence of rabid dogs in his neighborhood.” The second guy butchered and killed a cat
and ate the meat and organs in a dish known as “rua man.” The guy admitted that before he killed the
cat, it had been acting very weird, sitting in the dark in the corner meowing. Both guys got rabies from the dead animals. Somehow the infectious material got into them. Both of them became progressively worse and
died. The paper said, “The point of entry of the
rabies virus in these cases is unclear, but removal and preparation of the dog's and cat's
brains may have generated large amounts of infectious rabies virus.” The paper then used some brainy words to say
the virus got into their mouth, eyes, or nose. We guess the moral to this story is don’t
eat cats and dogs…and bats, for that matter. There have also been similar cases of rabies
from eating dogs in the Philippines and in China, according to that paper. We also had a look at reports of US cases. Most were from bats inside the US, but there
were a bunch of cases that involved Americans traveling abroad and then showing rabies symptoms
on their return home. The cases happened from 2003 to 2018. There were 43 in all, and 40 people died because
they didn’t receive the vaccine in time. The data included:
2003. Male, 64, bite, dog-mongoose, Puerto Rico. 2004. Male, 41, bite, dog, Haiti.
2006. Male, 2, bite, dog, Philippines. 2009. Male, 42, bite, dog, India. 2010. Male, 19, bite, dog, Mexico. 2011. Male, 40, bite, dog, Brazil. 2014, Male, 28, bite, dog, Guatemala. Some of you might’ve seen the pattern here. If you don’t want rabies, keep as far waway
from dogs as possible! Although it seems that only men have gotten
rabies, nine women have also died from this almost incurable disease, but they were all
bat bite deaths, bar one, who was a 65-year-old woman who died after being bitten by a street
pooch in India. What’s surprising is four of the people
on the list got rabies after receiving an organ transplant. The donor had died of rabies, but that hadn’t
to the autopsy. There have since been calls to check organ
donors more thoroughly. In one separate case, a US Air Force recruit
died, but it seems it wasn’t known rabies had killed him. He then donated his heart, kidneys, and liver
to three separate people in the US, and they all got rabies. In this case, all three were treated with
vaccines, but still, talk about having rotten luck. Now back to the start. What happened to the guy who woke up at night
with a bat sucking on his hand? He went into the hospital and had three rabies
shots on time. Even so, according to a paper, he “developed
right-sided facial paroxysms of severe pain with excessive right eye-lacrimation.” He then got worse. He couldn’t swallow. The weakness increased, and he died 15 days
after the onset of symptoms. This shouldn’t have happened, of course,
since we told you the shots should do the business. A study on the matter said this was the “first
reported failure of rabies PEP using modern cell-culture vaccine in the Western Hemisphere
in a patient who received PEP promptly after a confirmed exposure.” Just rotten luck, we guess. Anyway, he was 84, so his body might not have
been able to cope. There was a second case that was similar. This time it was an 80-year-old guy in Illinois
who, in 2021, woke up in his bedroom, we kid you not, with a bat sucking on his neck! If that were us, we’d have run downstairs
to get the crucifix and garlic, but this old guy just shrugged it off. He even refused to get the jabs. One of the reasons is he kept bats. He loved and trusted his bats. He might also have been rather stubborn. A month later, he had intense neck pain and
a killer headache, and his hands went numb. He also had trouble swallowing and speaking. He died soon after. The Lake County Health Department Executive
Director told the press, “Rabies infections in people are rare in the United States; however,
once symptoms begin, rabies is almost always fatal.” Now for a happier tale. When someone goes to the hospital with rabies
symptoms, doctors still try and save them even though it’s a bit like trying to win
a fairground hoopla game. Both of the previously discussed cases from
Vietnam might have had symptoms, but they were both put in an induced coma and pumped
full of antiviral drugs and other drugs to try to quell the disease raging through them. This is in line with something called the
Milwaukee Protocol. Does it work? Well, kind of. It’s worked for one person in the entire
world in what some folks might have called a miracle. She is Jeanna Giese, who was bitten by a bat
in church in 2004 in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. The bat had been flying through the church
dive bombing and annoying people. In what is possibly one of the most ironic
acts in human history, Jeanna smacked the bat with her good old prayer book. The bat was soon out for the count, or so
it seemed. When she picked it up by the wings, it started
screeching, and just as she threw it into a bush outside, it took a bite of her finger. This Christian bat abuser then went home and
washed the wound, only in three weeks’ time to realize her finger felt numb and was tingling. She just left it, though. Two days later, she wanted to throw up, and
a day after that, she was seeing two of everything. That’s when she went to the hospital. She wrote in a story, “By the time I got
there, I was semi-delirious and vomiting. I was asked to stand on one leg, but I couldn’t
keep my balance.” When she told them about assaulting an innocent
little bat with her hefty prayer book, the doctors said, oh my God. They told her parents she probably only had
hours to live. This was a bit of an exaggeration. The doctors should watch more Infographics
Show videos. One doctor told her he was going to wing it,
put her in a coma, and fill her veins with antiviral drugs. He gave her regular shots of ketamine, too,
a dissociative anesthetic medicine that, in high doses, can actually make a person look
like they have dumb rabies. A week later, Jeanna came out of her K-hole
and was informed she might just be the first person in the world to survive rabies after
the onset of symptoms. What the amazing doctor, Dr. Rodney Willoughby,
did that day became known as the Milwaukee Protocol. It’s the only treatment that’s ever worked
to save someone’s life when they’ve already become symptomatic. It took many weeks for Jeanna to recover,
and she had speech issues, but she gradually improved. Even so, a decade later, she still has some
speech and balance issues. She was still able to tell stories about her
experience, one of which stated, “I don’t have a problem with bats.” Amen to that. Now you need to watch a video about how something
like rabies could end the world, “The End of Civilization (Century by Century).” Or, have a look at “Viruses That Were Actually
Lab Leaks.”
