I have always found the disease of rabies interesting. I was
always told as a child not to play with raccoons while I was hunting or camping
because they most likely have rabies. I never really understood what rabies was
though. I always understood it as it makes an animal foam at the mouth and that
I should avoid it. I have never really considered what the disease may do to an
animal’s behavior. The only time I saw an animal with rabies was in the movie
Old Yeller and I knew they killed the dog because of it. In the movie the dog
got extremely aggressive after it was infected by a coyote with rabies. I never
put the aggressive behavior and rabies together until I recently read an
article about it.
A little background information about rabies to start. When
infected with the rabies virus, the central nervous system is infected causing
disease to the brain and death. The symptoms of this disease is common with
other illnesses. These symptoms usually are fever. Headache, and general
weakness and discomfort. As the disease persists the more extreme symptoms come
into play such as anxiety, confusions, partial paralysis, hallucinations,
agitation, hypersalivation, and difficulty swallowing. After a few days of
being infected death usually occurs.
There has been a new study that has found that a tiny piece
of the rabies virus can actually bind to inhibit certain receptors in the brain
that regulates the behavior in an animal. This therefore leads to a communication
error in the brain and leads to frenzied behaviors that favor the transmission
of the virus. This means it leads to the behavior to make the animals bite and
infect other mammals. They are hoping that now they will have a better chance
in treating the infectious disease. The research itself has provided a
molecular mechanism of have the infectious disease effects certain behaviors
within the animal.
99 percent of all rabies transmissions to humans is through
dogs. There was no explanation of why the disease led to aggressive behavior.
The rabies disease is made up of five genes and a dog has 20,000 genes that
control the central nervous system. Somehow the five genes associated with
disease is able to reprogram the dog’s behavior to make them lose their sense
of fear and become aggressive and bite to spread the disease to another
organism. The disease has adapted to affect an animal in a way that is knows
that it will be spread to other organisms.
Its creepy to me to think that a disease is able to do this
to insure it will continue to live and spread to other animals. It’s crazy that
it took so long for them to find why this disease causing animals to be
aggressive. Out of all the genes that a dog has, only five are changed and that
somehow effects the overall behavior of the animal. That really scares me but
also shows how one small change can lead to disease in many organisms. Remember
to keep your pets vaccinated!!
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