Stuff You Should Know - How Rabies Works

Episode Date: February 9, 2016

Rabies may have gotten a lot of attention in the U.S. in the 70s and 80s, but it's still an issue in developing countries. Learn all about this nasty virus in today's episode. And stay away from racoons and bats. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant with Jerry and This Is Stuff You Should Know. You're foaming at the mouth. Jerry, don't let them bite you. All right, you bet Jerry, I'm gonna have to put both of you

down, I'm like old yeller. Let's do it, about time. I knew from day one when we started working together that this is how this would conclude. Yeah, me shooting both of you because of rabies. Putting us down. Old Yeller at the week. Wait, wait, speaking of Old Yeller, I'm sorry.

Have you seen the kids in the hall take on Old Yeller? No. I don't think so. Yeah, Paul makes the kid shoot the dog and his face is sprayed with blood from the gunshot wound. It's wonderful. Yeah, worst children's book ever. Oh, I guess we just spoiled it, huh? Everyone knows Old Yeller gets rabies and is shot.

Yes, I don't even bother emailing him. But there is a happy ending. You know, Old Yeller has pups and they get a pup. Oh, so instead of like coming back as a ghost dog that like helps things turn out well for the family, it left a legacy in the Dakinzian view. Right. Still the worst children's book ever. Although it teaches valuable life lessons.

About death. Why you got to do that by killing Old Yeller? I don't know, but I mean, it works. All right, rabies. I don't know, I thought we had done this one. It seems like an obvious one for us. Yeah, it's definitely in our wheelhouse for sure. I did not know this either.

It is a virus on every continent in the world except Antarctica. I think there's a lot of viruses that hold that title. That aren't on Antarctica. Yeah, inhospitable place. Yeah, and if a virus is on every continent, chances are it's a very old one too. And rabies definitely is extremely old. People have been writing about rabies for a very long time, the Mesopotamians. Who know it's old if you say that word.

Sure. They used to have a law where if your dog was rabid, you faced a stiff penalty, a fine of sorts. We have those laws today. Sure. In the United States. I mean a lot of our laws stem from Mesopotamia and the Code of Hammurabi. Sure. You know?

If you watch somebody's house burn down and don't do anything, that person can kill you still today. Just like from the Code of Hammurabi. So if your neighbor's house is on fire, you have to put it out. You have to help put it out. With Mesopotamia. I don't know. So the word rabies in many languages means rage or go crazy in Latin. It is from a Sanskrit term, rabahas, to do violence.

And then French, l'orage. L'orage. It's the sexiest form of rabies. Comes from the French noun robert meaning to go mad. So if you're not picking up on it, it's not a friendly virus. No. It's not the one that you get a dog. Well, actually we'll talk about that.

I'm going to save it. One time, I mean, there was nothing we could do about rabies. People went to Liege, Belgium to pray to St. Hubert. It's a round name, isn't it? St. Hubert was the patron saint of Huntsman. Not quality footwear. No, and apparently, no, that was St. Clark. Apparently.

That was St. Hubbins, actually. I've not heard of that. That's a spinal tap joke. You never get my spinal tap jokes. No, I need to see it more than once, apparently. They're for the people out there. That's fine. There's like 100 dudes.

I'll just sit here and be the straight man. I don't know what I'm talking about. Yeah, Derek St. Hubbins was the patron saint of his ancestors, patron saint of quality footwear. Great joke. That is a good joke, man. I'm sorry. I stepped all over it. That's right.

So in Liege, you would go and pray to St. Hubert for protection. That's probably not the most effective way to treat rabies. No. I don't blame people for making a pilgrimage to Liege from what I understand about rabies based on researching this. It's terrible. Yeah. It's horrific.

And fatal. And it wasn't until the late 19th century, 1885, when the late great Louis Pasteur. Man, this dude. What didn't that guy do to save the world? Yeah, we should. He's up in our line. And now we have a kind of an ongoing line of great scientists, so we will include him on the list.

And we need to start acknowledging the ladies, too. So, Madame Curie, we've got our eye on you, Miss. That's right. That's right. And anyway, so Louis Pasteur came up with a vaccine for rabies, and he was one of the early germ theory guys. He was a very prescient person. His inoculation trials were based on the idea that if you introduced some, like a low level

of rabies to a living being, that living being would produce antibodies, and you could introduce increasingly larger amounts over time, and eventually the person's antibodies would be robust enough so that if they ever faced rabies in the wild, they would be able to fight it off. Absolutely right. And what a crazy thing to think, though, you know? It is. When no one knows anything about germ theory, to think, like, why don't we put the disease

in the person? Maybe that'll help cure it. And I think that was around for a while, but I think it was like some arcane knowledge that not everyone knew about, and Pasteur really capitalized on. But he actually had been working on something using rabbits as test cases, and was basically, he proved it can work in humans by a boy who had been attacked by a dog, I think, and contracted rabies. Yeah.

And Louis Pasteur said, here goes nothing, and stuck him with the shot. And the parents went, here goes nothing. Right. He goes, no, nothing. And they said, well, you said this was going to work. I said, no such thing. That's good, Louis Pasteur. Thank you.

I think that the Chuck Jones version of Napoleon, everyone, Bugs Bunny used to hang out with him. Oh, yeah. That's how I learned to do a French accent. The great Chuck Jones. Sure. So rabies, let's talk a little bit about what it does in your body. It's really pretty vicious.

It is a viral disease, like we said at the top. And it attacks the central nervous system, the brain and the central nervous system. And it's part of the rabdo viridae family under the genus. You take the genus. The lysovirus. No, that was too easy. It was easy. And it is shaped like a bullet.

And when it comes in the body, it basically goes as fast as it can to the spinal cord. Through something called afferent nerves with an A, they carry impulses toward the central nervous system as opposed to afferent with an E, they carry impulses away. But it uses both. So this virus travels along the neural pathways through the central nervous system. And it goes immediately to the spinal cord and then up to the brain. And in the brain, that's where it replicates. Vicious.

You remember like HIV replicates inside T helper cells? Yeah. Well, rabies is a virus that replicates inside your neurons. They're brain cells, which is not a good place for a virus to start doing its replicating, right? That's right. And right after it starts replicating in the brain, it makes a second stop, a very important stop to your salivary glands.

And the reason it does that is because that is the number one mechanism of transmission for rabies. Yeah. That's when you see the foaming at the mouth. It's not just a symptom of rabies, but that's the main way that you're going to get it is by being bitten by something with all kinds of nasty rabid saliva. Right. And apparently because this stuff is wrecking your brain by hijacking your brain cells and

destroying them, there's two different versions of rabies, right? Yeah. Encephalatic, which is also known as the furious form of rabies. That's the one you think of when you think of a crazy rabid dog that's hallucinating and running around in circles and chasing its tail and biting at the air. Old Yeller, basically, although they toned it down a bit. They did because they didn't want to scare the kids. Before they shot killed them.

Really scared the kids. Yeah. And then there's the paralytic or dumb form. And that one is more like lapsing into a coma, basically. And I don't know, surely there's no way to predict which way the things the virus is going to go in a human, right? Because with destroying brain cells, I would think it would just be totally accidental whether it went toward the encephalatic or the paralytic form.

That's a good question. You know? It would just depend on where it lodges first, right? Yeah. But both of the forms are in the acute stage. And here's what's so scary. Once it's in the acute stage, once it's hit your central nervous system, you're done. Almost exclusively done.

And we'll talk about that. That is a very, for millennia, the idea behind rabies is like it's a fatal disease, 100% fatal. Yeah. Except now they've started to find a few cases here that's not the case and they're starting to wonder, okay, is this something we could treat after people are traditionally goneers? Well, that's a great tease.

So let's take a break and we'll come back right after this with more on rabies. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the

nostalgia starts flowing. Which episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s? Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh.

Life in relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, so we mentioned the two forms.

They're both in the acute stage and apparently both stages can happen in a single case. It's not necessarily one or the other. Right. It makes sense. Yeah. Like if this region of your brain is wrecked and you're furious and raging, well, eventually it's going to get to the part of your brain where you can't move or breathe and you slip into a coma and die of respiratory distress.

Right. You know? But I also got the impression it wasn't necessarily like that's the path, like it can start in the dumb stage as well. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Like it would just depend on where the virus, what part of your brain the virus goes to. It's got to, you know?

Yeah. Um, something I didn't realize about rabies chuck was that it's exclusive to mammals. I knew that. I didn't. But I also have wondered over the years, like why isn't like a rabid squirrel would be your worst nightmare, I imagine. Yeah. You know?

Because they'll already come at you. Yeah. You know? A rabid one would definitely come at you. One of the traits of symptoms of a rabid mammal is that a wild one has no fear of humans. Yeah. They're aggressive. Right.

In fact, there's a case I looked up as I often do just in the news and a little boy in New Jersey just this week was attacked by a raccoon. Well, yeah. This raccoon leapt onto his back while he was walking down the street during the day. And we will get to the hallmarks, but that's very important. If you see a nocturnal animal cruising around during the day at great speeds, stay away. Oh, yeah. You're not supposed to see raccoons in the neighborhood during the day.

Yeah. Just go get your paws BB gun. Well, I don't know about that, but call animal control and they'll get their BB gun. Sure. Yeah, this little boy was this raccoon jumped on his back and started biting his face and neck. Where did you learn to pronounce certain words? Raccoon.

Raccoon. No, I say raccoon. That's just one of my jokes. Oh, okay. People don't know, though. When I said Alex Baldwin, people literally wrote in like, what is wrong with you, Chuck? Like it's Alec. How'd you miss 30, Rock?

And Alec Baldwin said, I don't care. Yeah, I don't know who this Chuck is. So anyway, that's Clint Eastwood. Yeah. You're right. The little boy I think is going to be okay, which is the good news. But it's, well, we'll get to the rarity of it in the United States. Plus he was attacked in New Jersey, which is in the US, which means he's going to be

just fine. Right. But long way of saying that squirrels and mice and other smaller animals typically don't get it. And it makes good sense is because if they are attacked by a rabid animal, they're small and probably won't survive. They could very well get rabies. Every sign says they can, but they'll probably, poor little mouse, will probably just die.

Right. Because if a raccoon gets its hands on a mouse, and it bites it, that saliva is going to be transmitted to the wound, but you also need the host to be alive for the virus to replicate in that host. Exactly. So if their neck is broken and they're dead, then it's not going to work. But yeah, absolutely. But woodchucks, you said?

Yes. You can get a woodchuck with the rabies. Woodchucks, raccoons, apparently in the United States, raccoons are the most common vector for the disease. Yeah. Now. Yes. But for the most part, it's slightly larger small mammals.

Does that make sense? Yeah. Woodchucks, raccoons. Medium-sized mammals. Medium-sized on the smaller side. Small to medium? A medium-sized mammal that means like an egg is a raccoon. Okay.

And it takes a few months for the disease to run its course in an animal. But the scary thing is, it can lie dormant in humans for years, months or years. That's very scary. Super scary. Yeah. Because you guys don't realize this, like you think it's like frothing at the mouth or something. No.

The rabies virus is one of these scariest viruses on the planet. It is. So like I said, saliva is the mode of transmission for most rabies cases. And you can catch it very easily. Technically if you had like an open wound and you like rubbed your finger where the open wound was, I guess I should have specified that earlier, on the saliva of a rabid raccoon, you could easily catch rabies. Right.

But that's an uncommon thing to do. You could also, if you took the brain of that raccoon and rubbed it on your open wound of your finger, you could also catch it. Even more uncommon. But if you came across a raccoon's poop that was rabid and you took it and just rubbed it all over your hands, the camouflage, the scent of your hands. Probably the most uncommon. You would not catch rabies.

That's the good news. Yeah. It doesn't transfer in the feces or this blood or the pee. Yeah. The urine. The pee-pee. Oh man, it's been pee-fest at my house. You want a little quick side story?

Sure. In the litter box, before I went to Birmingham, and four days later, we realized that I didn't put litter in the litter box. I emptied it, put the lid back on, put it back in, rushed out of the door to drive to Birmingham. Right. And four days later, we were like, our cats are sick because they're peeing on everything in the house.

Emily went over and she went, hey, well, I won't say what she said. It wasn't, hey honey. Yeah. Guess what, there's a lake of urine in the litter box and it's all your fault. Oh man. So we had to throw a lot of things away in our home that previously we're working just fine. Man.

And I got the dummy of the year award in our house. That's cool. You should Instagram that trophy. Dummy of the year? Yeah. It's a tattoo now on my lower back. Nice. Of Alfred E. Newman.

So anyway, we've been in urine land. That is so gross. It is so gross. And cat pee is not, you know, it's, it's tough to mask. So we're, we're really, uh, our work especially lakes of it. Yeah. What a dummy. So, uh, anyway, just the moral of the story is litter is a very important part of the litter

box. Yeah. So, and luckily if your cats are rabid, you wouldn't have caught anything from that. No, but I'm sure I have, uh, what's it called? What's the cat disease from changing litter? Oh, uh, toxoplasmosis gondii. I'm sure I've had that for years. Sure.

Um, that's why you do most of the things you do. That's right. So, uh, it is a very adaptive disease. Um, and here's another scary thing. Although it's, it's not that scary cause it's super, super rare. Yeah. But in laboratories, it has been transmitted through the air, aerosol transmission. And they have found one case where it actually happened in the wild, but it was a cave that

had like tens of millions of infected bats like sneezing and coughing up their junk everywhere. Right. And in that case, uh, someone got rabies supposedly through the air. Three people walked into the cave in Texas. But that, that's, uh, again, not something you need to worry about. Yeah. But humans can spread it too. And remember, you can spread it through saliva, which means that if you are kissing, especially

kissing with tongue. French style. Um, the, uh, rabid person, and remember it can take months, if not years for the symptoms to set on, um, you could conceivably catch rabies from that. You can also catch it as an STD, uh, through sexual contact, they believe. Sure. This is the CDC theorizing at this point. There's no documented cases.

Right. Um, and then you could also, uh, conceivably catch it from like sharing a cigarette with somebody or drinking after somebody, uh, using the same glass. Again, in theory. There are any transmission of shared saliva. But here's the scariest one to me. Um, it has happened before where you get a transplant of an organ, typically a corneal transplant and get rabies that way.

Yeah. It's like we accidentally gave you a cornea with rabies. Yeah. Sorry. And one of the problems you think, well, how could that possibly happen? Apparently rabies is very hard to detect. Yeah. The main places to detect it, remember it doesn't show up in your blood or anything

like that. Yeah. No, your inner feces. Is, um, in the saliva and in the, uh, um, brain, well, yeah, in the saliva, it's not even super accurate and it takes longer. So for the past 40 years in the United States, the way they test for rabies, if an animal has bit your child is they capture it and they cut it set off and inspect the brain. Right.

That's horrifying. Yeah. It is. Uh, but unfortunately like a necessary, I guess, of a raccoon bites your kid off with the head. Maybe an animal lover out there who's a developing scientist will come up with a better, more accurate rabies test that will save the lives of thousands and millions of woodchucks around the world.

But I wonder how many times they've been like, oh, thankfully no rabies. Yeah. No, I'm sure. But it's cut off. Yeah. Like imagine being the clinician who did that. Yeah. It's kind of bummed you out.

Yeah. Absolutely. Because it's like this thing's head was cut off because somebody thought it had rabies. Terrible. All right. So, um, everybody, um, knows through popular culture and things like Old Yeller that the foaming of the mouth of a crazed looking dog is a pretty good sign to stay clear. Right.

But there are many other ways, especially if they have the dumb form that you might not know. Yeah. Uh, and here are some of the symptoms, uh, partially or fully paralyzed animal loss of appetite. Yeah. And a lot of these can be confused for other things because my dearly deceased dog Lucy probably ticked off about 90% of these.

Was she really like PCP strange behaviors like snapping at the air or turning in circles? Lucy did that. Uh, nocturnal animals who wander during the day, um, like I said, if you see a raccoon walking around during the day, it's not a good sign. No. Drill excessively. Lucy drooled. Uh, wild animals who showed no fear of humans, uh, signs of pica, like eating things that

aren't food. Lucy did that all the time. Yeah. Um, sporadic changes in mood or behavior. Lucy. Restless or aggressive? No. Obviously disoriented Lucy.

And then a change in voice, which I thought was strange. She was like, uh, how's it going? And generally it varies by region. So like maybe here in the South, raccoons or maybe in another place, it might be skunks largely. Right. With the animals that have it the most. Right.

Um, yeah, but apparently in the United States, it's raccoons for sure. They have the most, but the mode of transmission in the United States, um, comes through bats more frequently. Right. Yeah. That's the big, the big daddy these days. So if you get like a hundred bats and a hundred raccoons, more raccoons are going to have rabies, but you're more likely to catch rabies from a bat than a raccoon.

Yeah. And why is that? Well, there's a few reasons. Bats can get into places that raccoons can't. Sure. Um, and, uh, bats also have very tiny teeth. Yeah. Uh, and if you're sleeping in a room and you wake up and there's a bat in it, it's recommended

that you kill that bat and take it in for rabies testing. Yeah. Um, or cast it alive. So they can get it settled. So then they can kill it for you. They can do your dirty work for you. Um, but the, the reason why is because a bat's teeth are so fine that you can have been bitten in the night and it wouldn't have woken you up.

You won't, you won't know that you were bitten, but you may have contracted rabies in that case. Yeah. See our excellent episode on bats. Yeah. That was a good one because they bats are wonderful. Yeah. You remember we just came like bat crazy over that one.

Yeah. Very, uh, bat friendly podcast. Yeah. So don't, don't kill the bats. As a matter of fact, just look the other way. If you see a bat in your room because something bad is going to happen to that bat. If your dog, uh, we'll take a break after this, but if your dog is potentially bitten by an animal you think might be rabid, they will be isolated for 10 days.

Um, and if they make it through that 10 days, then you're home free. Uh, if they don't sadly, that means you have to go the old Yeller route except these days it's much more humane. Well, I don't know about more humane, but they don't take it behind the bar and shoot it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would call that more humane, but in, you know, rural Texas they might be like,

no, that's quick and easy and painless. Yeah. Just like the shot. But the lethal injection, yeah, I'm sure that's what they call in Texas. Okay. All right. Let's take a break then. I'm going to, uh, get your stuff together, get my stuff together and we'll come back

with more rabies. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Is that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia

starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And Maybe thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Chucky, have you ever been to Bali? Nope.

You haven't? Neither have I. Okay. Well, Bali, like Hawaii and some other places around the world, is actually a, it was a rabies free zone, a place where like no cases of rabies have been reported. Yeah. They're usually isolated, which makes it hard to get rabies

into. Yeah. And they usually also have some really top-notch governmental restrictions. Like if you try to take a dog in or out of Hawaii, it takes a very long time and a lot of paperwork. And one of the reasons why is because they don't want rabies coming into their, to their state.

You taking Momo to Hawaii? No, that's why. Yeah. She would be, but no, we, basically she would get out of quarantine about the time we were leaving. Gotcha. So, but my in-laws moved and they, they took their dogs with them.

Yeah. It was a big deal. Yeah. I'm sure. But in Bali specifically, they were rabies free until 2008. And some dogs contracted rabies somehow and bit some people and some people died and it was a big deal. I'm sure they were like, oh, great.

There goes our rabies free designation. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. So they can get it back though, right? Well, yeah. The government has been eradicating aggressively the rabies that was found on the island.

And I'm not sure if they're doing this. I know they're doing a lot of euthanizing or they did in the affected areas. But in the United States, some wildlife services, they're leaving basically what amounts to like a high dose of oral rabies vaccine. Yeah. As tasty bait out, just out in the woods to try to like control

rabies in the raccoon population. Apparently it doesn't harm humans or dogs too. Right. The bait. And the reason that they're doing this is because they saw what a great work, what a great job at eradicating rabies among dogs in the United States. Yeah.

Because it used to be that rabies in the U.S. was very frequently transmitted by dogs. And in a lot of the rest of the world, the dogs are still a major mode of transmission, right? Sure. But in the U.S., a rabies vaccination push among pets has really lowered that. Yeah.

And in the dog population especially. Yeah. And push meaning laws. Sure. I don't think it's in every state now, but I think most states now require by law that you've... It's pretty sensible. Yeah.

If you have a pet, you should have a non-rabid pet. Yeah. Like he would say, no, no. I don't want my dog getting that rabies. Fine rain would say that. Probably so. This is the most recent stat we have in 2006. And zero, one, one percent of all rabies cases in the United States

were almost at feline were canine. 11,000th of a percent. Yeah. So that's virtually nil. And I believe in 2006, that same year, not one case of rabies death came from an American dog. Not one case of human rabies death, right? Correct.

Yeah. So 24 percent of all U.S. wildlife rabies cases are bats. Yeah. Which led to in 2006, two of the three rabies-related deaths were from bat transmissions, bat bites. Yeah. Which is not good. Actually, let me...

I spoke wrong. That... It wasn't in 2006. It was only... Since 1995, there has not been one case of death from an American dog. Man. So that's great. They really kind of eradicated that here.

That's right. But elsewhere in the world, again, catching rabies from being bitten by a dog is still a real problem. As a matter of fact, the World Health Organization called rabies among neglected diseases. Yeah. One of the most neglected. One of the most neglected among neglected diseases. There's still 30,000 to 70,000 people who die every year.

It's around one every 10 minutes from rabies. In the developing world. Yeah. Think about that. In the United States, three people died in 2006. That was a bad year. Yeah. 70,000 people, as much as 70,000 people around the world, are dying from rabies.

And these... The countries that have these really high rabies mortality rates in humans are also the ones that usually have the least amount of money to pay for inoculations. And also, even further, have even less money to inoculate their dogs. Right. So, there's a huge push right now among scientists to be like, rest of the world, you guys need to pay to eradicate rabies, at least in the dog population around the world. Yeah.

Do something. And also, when you have that rural areas, they're not able to get to the clinics to receive those regular inoculations. Yeah. Because so, Pasteur came up with the rabies vaccine and basically his technique has been only slightly altered over the years, that's still a series of shots. In the United States or the West, the ones that we have are five shots over the course of a period of time.

Yeah. And again, it's boosting your immunity slowly. And it's a very similar thing in the... What did the guy in the email say for the last listener mail instead of developing more? Lower income countries. Lower income countries, they have a schedule as well. It's not all getting them at once, they have to boost your immunity.

And it may not be something like driving down the street to the minute clinic to get this stuff done. Right. You may have to travel quite a ways and again, miss some work. So, it's a big problem. Yeah. You mentioned Pasteur's brilliant idea. He used the...

It's called an attenuated form of rabies. It's weakened but still alive that he gathered from spinal cords of animals. These days, they kind of do the same thing, but it is not a live form of the virus. It is a dead form of the virus, but like you said, the same idea is it will give you this slowly and before it reaches your spinal cord, ideally. It's a big one. Ideally, if you want to live, then you've built up the immunity. Yeah.

Hooray. Yeah. So, if you have some extra dough in your pocket and want to help out some groups, there's a couple of groups that are working to eradicate rabies in low-income countries like Rita, rabies in the Americas, and rabies-free world are both working to eradicate rabies elsewhere. Yeah. And if you have been bitten by an animal that you were worried about, I would just immediately, you know, if I got bitten by a squirrel or something, I would go to the doctor and just

get it checked out, obviously, immediately. You don't walk that one off. But here are some of this, oh, it's a little sting. Oh, well. Let's see what happens. Yeah. Like the man who castrated himself and then sat down to dinner in the 19th century, remember we talked about him?

Oh, yeah. He read his Bible and then ate dinner and then went to the doctor. Right. Wow. Here are some of the symptoms in humans. Humans? Human beings. Not human beings?

I vary it. Are you rabid? Stomach pain. That's a change in personality right there. Anxiety, I'm also biting at the air. Stomach pains, anxiety, restlessness, fever. Do you have any of this? Nope.

Increased aggression, sore throat, excessive saliva, hallucinations, delirium. If that's happening, you are really like should go to the doctor. Yeah. Coma, sporadic pulse. At that point, you should have someone take you to the doctor. And then something called hydrophobia, which we should cover. That used to be a word for rabies. Like you could say that person has rabies or you could say that person has hydrophobia

and it used to mean the same thing. And why? What's the deal with hydrophobia? It's an intense, unreasonable fear of water that develops from rabies symptoms apparently. Yeah. Because I think drinking is, you have a very violent, painful spasms and responses to trying to swallow water and so you become fearful of water. That's crazy.

Which is really, really sad because you're drooling and you're producing tons of saliva but you also are just dying of thirst, basically. But if you do drink anything, the pain from your throat muscles contracting is so bad that you will just not drink. You would just rather not drink anything and apparently you become fearful of even the concept of drinking so you get scared of water. That's also because your brain is deteriorating at a rapid rate. Man.

But yeah, this is not fun. This is not nice stuff. And again, for years and years and years and years, up until the last few years, I think, the common conventional wisdom was if rabies got to your central nervous system, bye-bye. We might as well old yellow you because you're not going to survive and you're going to die. One of the worst deaths we could think of. And it wasn't until 2004 when it's the lucky lady. Yeah.

Gina Geiss. I thought you were going to say Gina Grishan. No. It's like, oh, that's what happened to her. Gina Geiss. She was a girl, a teenager in Wisconsin who was bitten by a bat, I think. And some doctor said, you're a goner, but I'm not going to give up on you, Gina. No way.

No how. Sleep now, baby. I'm going to put you in a coma. And he put her in a medically induced coma and it was enough so that her body was able to fight off the rabies infection. Amazing. So she survived the rabies infection without being inoculated previously. And apparently without the inoculation being given to her in a rapid enough time.

So she literally survived a rabies infection. And now they call that procedure the Milwaukee Protocol. And it saved five more people's lives. They call it that? And there was a study in Peru, in the Andes, a lot of Peruvian groups live near bats. Sure. They have to deal with bats. And apparently some Peruvians have developed immunity to rabies and they documented, I

think, about a dozen Peruvians who survived rabies without any inoculations. So they're saying, okay, this isn't a 100% fatal disease. We can work with that. But it's like really big gangbusters news. It's almost like a natural inoculation that's happening, though, the same idea, right? They're getting exposed to it gradually. I don't know. I don't know if these people have been bitten before or if some sort of inoculation was passed

down to them through heredity. You know? I'm not sure. Like Grand Papi was strong against the rabies. Right. So I am. Right. That's how the genes work.

All right, from 1950s to the roughly mid-1980s, the horror stories were true. You did get, like, upwards of 20 to 23 shots in the belly in the abdomen to treat rabies. With big needles, right? Yeah. That was not an old wives' tale. It was a very painful procedure. I tried to find out why it was done in the belly. And the only thing I could find is completely unsubstantiated.

What makes sense, apparently, after you start having these shots somewhere between 10 and 20, you start having really bad reactions and inflammation. But you need to give them in the same area so the belly was the largest part of the body that you could still find a place to give the injection. So I don't know if it's true or not. That makes sense. It definitely does. And we have to mention Ozzy Osbourne.

What, biting the head off a bat? Yeah. It's a live bat, you know. Well, there's different stories. He swears up and down it wasn't alive. No, no, no. He swears it was alive because he felt the head moving in his mouth. Oh, other people have said that it wasn't alive.

The fan that threw the bat on stage said it was dead. Ozzy's Ozzy. Right. He's like, it was alive. That's a good Ozzy. Thank you. But that is not an old wife. He also bit the head off a pigeon at a party, but he thought the bat was a toy, apparently.

He bit the bat's head and did get those injections as a preventative measure, but he did not ever contract rabies. Smart. And this, you know, who knows. It's also called a legend in some circles. But I think it really happened. It's documented. While I was researching this, I was like, wow, I am not inoculated against rabies.

Maybe I should just go ahead and do that. That'd be kind of neat to be like, go ahead and bite me, raccoon, you crazy raccoon. I'm fine. If you could continue your ongoing battle with your squirrels, your porch deck squirrels. No, the squirrels one, I had to take down the bird feeder. You just gave up. No, the condo complex was like, you're not allowed to have those. They retract squirrels.

I'm like, yeah, no doubt they will. They retract squirrels. I know. So I said, all right, it's fine. You got anything else? Nope. Rabies, if you want to know more about it, type that word into the search bar at howstuffworks.com. R-A-B-Y-S and it will bring up this awesome article.

I know. I know. I'm just teasing you. Do you want me to spell it correctly? I really don't spell that way. R-A-B-I-E-S. That's right. All right.

Did you say the... Oh, and since I misspelled something, it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this cringe-worthy experience. Oh, God. Why did we ask for this? I know. I've been listening for a couple of years, writing for the first time to tell you a compelling story about the time my dad's eyeball fell out of his head.

Perhaps I should say it was forced out of his head. It takes place before I was born, but the way he tells it, it will make you hesitant to go water skiing. See, my dad was a mob enforcer in Las Vegas. In particular, you wouldn't want to let your body or your face become parallel to the water surface when you're going around a bend in the river. So when that happens, you could experience what happened to my dad, his face skimmed to the water, and the force of that caused his eyeball to pop right out of his head.

Oh, my God. It's stuff that urban legends are made of. So there my dad is in excruciating pain, treading water with his eyeball in the palm of his hand. If you're ever so lucky as to have your eyeball outside of your head, hope that it's still attached like my dad's eyeball was. Can you imagine he got river water in his eye socket? God, he forced it back into his eye socket, and there was nothing else he could do at

that crucial moment, as I understand that he never went to see a doctor. And his eye has been turned at a 45 degree angle ever since. His name is John Rambo. That is crazy. She said he was relieved six months later while the white static he was seeing slowly started to return, and he had normal vision once again. It's outcome bias if I've ever seen it cringe. If you experience any squeamish feelings, I consider it a story well told.

Yeah, well, well told story. That is from Lina or Lina in California. From California. Boy, I don't know. Her dad has made us some tough stuff if he did not go to a doctor. He's like hero or not, or Seymour Haya. Yeah. It's crazy.

So somebody else wrote in and got me about having to get shots like up their nose. That one got me too. So whoever wrote in with that one heads off. Well, at least this guy got a great nickname out of it, Old River Water Socket Jimmy. Yeah. The mouthful. If you have a cringe-worthy story, keep it to yourself. Send us something else in via tweet to S Y S K podcast or join us on facebook.com slash

stuff you should know. Send us an email to stuffpodcastthouselfworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics visit HowStuffWorks.com Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

Send a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.