The History of Rabies Virus

Rabies virus is not something that we hear much about anymore. Since the 1970’s the number of rabies-attributed deaths in the United States has been steadily declining. This is a result of vaccination protocols as well as animal control programs. Currently human rabies cases in the United States are rare, with only 1 to 3 cases reported annually (CDC 2014). Since rabies has become less of a threat in the U.S. the history of the disease is not as widely considered as it was in the past, however it is still beneficial to know how it all started.

Rabies has been around since 2000 B.C. where Mesopotamian law declared that the owner of a dog who is showing symptoms of rabies should ensure that no person gets bitten. If it was to happened and the person did die, the owner was fined heavily (Dunlop 1996). In ancient times the term “hair of the dog” referred to the belief that rabies could be cured by killing the dog and placing its fur in the wound. The first epizootic case of rabies in the New World occurred in Boston from 1768-1771. Epizootic is considered a disease event in a nonhuman population, which is similar to an epidemic in humans (Baer 1991). Wild animals carried the disease at this time and it was then transmitted to domestic animals as well. Wild animals accounted for 92.4% of all cases reported to the CDC. Raccoons are the species reported most frequently to carry the disease (40.6%), followed by skunks and bats (29.4% and 14%). Foxes account for 5.4% (Finnegan 2002). At this time in history the symptoms of rabies were seen as unusual, and this was when it was first considered a new disease.

Rabies then spread all across North America, and from there to the rest of the continent. During the 19^th century in France and Belgium, Saint Hubert was branding people who had been bitten with a key used to cauterize their wound, in hopes of protecting them from rabies (Baer 1991). At this point in time the fear of rabies had become irrational; it was not uncommon for a person who had been bitten by a dog to commit suicide or be killed by others (Rotivel 2009). This was when Louis Pasteur began working on testing of post exposure treatments. Pasteur was the first scientist to artificially attenuate viruses for use in vaccines. He created several veterinary vaccines before his development of the rabies vaccine in 1885 for use in humans (historyofvaccines.org). It was first used successfully in 1885 on Joseph Meister, a nine-year-old boy who had been attacked by a rabid dog (Berche 2012). Since the development of the vaccine, rabies has become a preventable disease in the US. However, infection still prevails in other areas of the country with over 55,000 deaths every year in Asia and Africa (WHO 2016). More than one-third of these deaths occur in India alone. India has the largest population of stray dogs in the world. Today dogs are vaccinated as well as humans as a way to prevent the spread of the disease. However in China animals are rarely vaccinated, and as a result in 2006 after three human deaths from Rabies, officials began a campaign to kill 50,000 dogs in Yunnan Province (Finnegan 2002).

It is important that people today are still readily informed about rabies so that if they do get bitten they can seek treatment right away in order to prevent the onset of symptoms (WHO). Each year more than 15 million people worldwide receive a post-bite vaccination (WHO). However, up until about a decade ago if someone who was bitten did not seek immediate vaccination and symptoms began to show, all doctors could do was provide palliative care until death. This changed in 2004, when a 6-year-old girl from Wisconsin was bitten and a month later became very sick. The Medical Team at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin decided to try a novel approach, which would later be called the Milwaukee Protocol. In this approach, the patient was put into a medically induced coma for six days, meanwhile she was given antiviral drugs giving her body time to build up antibodies. A month later, she was declared virus free and this made her the first person to have survived rabies (CDC 2016). This treatment then saw success in a few other patients, however it still remains controversial in the medical world. Throughout the years, it is clear that what we know about rabies along with the prevention and treatment of it has come a long way. Hopefully future research can be targeted to making vaccinations more affordable, so that third world countries can have access to them as well.

Bibliography:

Baer, George (1991). The Natural History of Rabies. CRC Press.                                                                   ISBN 9780849367601.

Berche, A., (2012). “Louis Pasteur, from crystals of life to vaccination”. Clinical Microbiology and Infection 18(5), 1-6. doi:10.1111/j.1469-0691.2012.03945.x

Dunlop, Robert H; Williams, David J (1996). Veterinary Medicine: An Illustrated History.                                     Mosby. ISBN 0-8016-3209-9.

Finnegan, C. J. Brookes, S. M., Johnson, N. (2002). “Rabies in North America and Europe”. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 95, 9-13.

Rotivel, Yolande. “Introduction”. Federation of American Scientists.

http://www.cdc.gov/rabies/exposure/index.html

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs099/en/

http://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/timelines/pasteur

Images:

http://www.cdc.gov/worldrabiesday/images/ff-rabies-cell.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Middle_Ages_rabid_dog.jpg

http://www.thehindu.com/multimedia/dynamic/01220/28TH-OPEDRABIES6_1220549f.jpg