Book Excerpt
Where's the balance point in that dynamic interplay between transmission and virulence? It differs from case to case. A virus can succeed nicely in the long term, despite killing every individual infected, if it manages to get itself passed onward to new individuals before the death of the old. Rabies does that by traveling to the brain of an infected animal -- commonly a dog, a fox, a skunk, or some other mammalian carnivore, with flesh-biting habits and sharp teeth -- and triggering aggressive changes of behavior. Those changes induce the mad animal to go on a biting spree. In the meantime, the virus has traveled to the salivary glands as well as the brain, and therefore achieves transmission into the bitten victims, even though the original host eventually dies or is killed with an old rifle by Atticus Finch.
:D
From David Quammen's Spillover. In the next paragraph he talks about how herbivores can actually get rabies also, but we usually don't hear about those cases because, as he notes, "A poor rabid cow may let out a piteous bellow and bump into a wall, but it can't easily skulk down a village lane, snarling and nipping at bystanders."
dancing around the four sides on dreamwidth ||
dancers || join the dance
:D
From David Quammen's Spillover. In the next paragraph he talks about how herbivores can actually get rabies also, but we usually don't hear about those cases because, as he notes, "A poor rabid cow may let out a piteous bellow and bump into a wall, but it can't easily skulk down a village lane, snarling and nipping at bystanders."
dancing around the four sides on dreamwidth ||
dancers || join the dance