Can rabies be transmitted reliably by food or drink

[tamtrible]

This is for my Nazi-killing time traveler from last time. So, time period nowish and late 1920s/early 1930s (1930 might be my sweet spot), location pretty much anywhere now, or in Germany in the '30s. Search term "can rabies be transmitted by food

Comments

[laurose8]

The trouble with viruses is, innocent people are likely to be infected.

[tamtrible]

Well, if the virus is 1. distributed in a controlled manner, 2. not typically transmitted by air or the like, and 3. has pretty obvious symptoms before someone can transmit it by most activities that people regularly do to each other, the risk of spreading it to innocents is relatively small.

[dinogrrl]

This is my thought as well. Also rabies can sometimes take a long time to finally show up and kill someone, depending on infection site and how much of the virus was transmitted. Incubation time has been recorded as ranging from a few days to over six years. Average incubation is a few months but still, that is a really long time for the victim to still be running around doing their evil thing. Rabies would be a dramatic form of murder, yes, but I would think very impractical given there's plenty of other things that would kill more reliably and quickly in this situation.

[belleweather]

Yeah, it's really a blood-to-blood or saliva-to-blood transmission.

That said, I wouldn't figure that an injectable version was too completely out of the realm of future-tech possibility. Thing is that it takes a fairly long time to kill, so it's a bit less than satisfying as a murder weapon. Also, there is a vaccine, but it wasn't widely used until 1967.

[tamtrible]

And you likely wouldn't get vaccinated if you didn't know you'd been exposed.

[duckodeath]

I'm just curious -- does it really need to be that complicated with diseases and so on? It seems to me the more complicated the plan, the less likely it is to succeed. It also sounds like you're trying to kill a whole bunch of people. Is that even really necessary? I bet you could pretty much end the Nazi threat, especially if it's before the election in 1930, by getting rid of no more than about 10 guys, with the top three of course being Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler. Get rid of them and a few others and I cannot see the Nazis ever being any kind of threat to anyone every again.

[tamtrible]

She has a list, probably of 20 or fewer people, but she's trying to avoid either being caught herself, or having an innocent person (particularly her relative Eva Braun, whom she resembles) getting, say, executed for murder. The critical ones would be the 3 you mentioned, likely, but she probably has a just-to-be-sure list.

[tamtrible]

And the reason for the slightly elaborate plot is to make it look more like a cluster of bad luck, and less like an intentional assassination attempt.

[tamtrible]

http://europeanhistory.about.com/od/Nazi-Germany/tp/The-Key-Nazis.htm has a list, she'd probably want most or all of those, if she could get them, and maybe a handful of others.

[elenbarathi]

As others have said, no, you really can't transmit rabies through food or drink, but there are plenty of other poisons and pathogens to use.

Two slow poisons to consider are 'bath salts' (if insanity before actual death is desired) and acetominophen, AKA Tylenol, which causes no noticeable symptoms until suddenly the liver is failing. In the 1940's there would have been no way to detect either drug.

Aconite and oleander are among the deadliest of plant poisons, easily added to a wide variety of recipes.

[tamtrible]

Tylenol hadn't occurred to me. That might be an excellent one (provided it could be more or less invisibly added to some sort of food or beverage, with sufficient care), since it would probably puzzle the *hell* out of the doctors at the time.

[elenbarathi]

I would think concentrated liquid acetominophen could be added to almost any soup, curry, sauce, salad dressing or mixed beverage. It won't make a person woozy, or nauseated, or jittery or anything. Of course, it does take quite a high dose in one day, or slightly lower doses over time. It would work best on heavy drinkers, and probably be indistinguishable from liver failure brought on by drink and/or microbial infection.

Speaking of microbes, E. coli and salmonella are always readily available. Food poisoning isn't a 'guaranteed kill', but it would sure slow a person down - or a whole group of people who ate together. It could potentially avert suspicion about the death of one or two people who had food poisoning and some deadlier poison.

[tamtrible]

Good idea on the general food poisoning cover story.

[orthent]

This post is already almost two weeks old, but your comment put me in mind of a novel in which rabies virus is used as a murder weapon. The killer (who had previously been vaccinated against the disease) infected his victims by mixing the live virus with perfume and spraying it in their faces. Presumably it got in their eyes, noses and mouths.

The book is David Lindsey's A Cold Mind.

[tamtrible]

At this point, I think I have better options than rabies, for more or less undetectably killing people. But thanks for the idea.