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Hi, this is Hillary Clinton, host of the new podcast, You and Me both, there's a lot to be anxious and worried about right now, and it's made so much worse by the fact that we can't be together. So I find myself on the phone a lot, talking with friends, experts, really anyone who can help make some sense of these challenging times. These conversations have been a lifeline for me.

And now I hope they will be for you to please listen to you and me both starting September 29th on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, check here for your Saturday select if you ever wanted to know how rabies works, we talk about it in great detail from February 9th, 2016. Give it a try. Why don't you not rabies, that is. But this podcast episode, how rabies works.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of NPR Radio's HowStuffWorks.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, Judge Charles W. Chuck Bright, sharing stuff, you should know you're foaming at the mouth, Jerry.

Don't let them bite you. Whoop, whoop, whoop. All right. He bit. Jerry, I'm going to have to put both of you down like Old Yeller. Let's do it. It's about time I knew from day one when we started working together that this is how it is we conclude. Yeah. Me shooting both of you because of rabies, putting us down. Uh, Old Yeller. Wait, wait. Speaking of Old Yeller, I'm sorry.

Have you seen the kids in the hall take an 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, one of the worst children's book ever.

Well, I guess we just spoiled it, huh? Everyone knows Old Yeller gets rabies and is shot. Yeah. So 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 helps things turn out well for the family. Yeah, it left a legacy in the Dawkins 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'd 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.

A lot of viruses that hold that that title aren't on Antarctica. Sure. 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 burned 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 in Mesopotamia. So the word rabies in many languages means a rage or go crazy in Latin. It is from a Sanskrit term. Rob has to do violence and then French lower house lower.

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

Going to save it for a long time. I mean, there is nothing we could do about rabies. Yeah. Um, people went to Liege, Belgium to pray to Saint Hubert. Yeah. That's a round name, isn't it not. Yeah. Saint Hubert was the patron saint of Huntsman. OK, and that quality footwear. No, and apparently apparently no.

That was Saint Claude. Apparently it was St. Hubbins.

Actually, I've not heard of that. It's a Spinal Tap joke. You never get my Spinal Tap joke. No, I need to see it more than once. Apparently there for the people out there, that's fine. There's like one hundred 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 Lige, you would go and pray to Saint Hubert for protection. Probably not the most effective way to treat rabies. No, I don't blame people for making a pilgrimage to Lige. 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, he what didn't that guy do to save the world?

Yeah, we should. He's up in our line now. We have a kind of an ongoing line of, like, great scientists.

Hmm. Uh, so we will include him on the list and we need to start acknowledging the ladies, too. So, Madame Curie. Sure. 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 he was one of the early germ theory guys. He was very prescient person. Oh, yeah.

His his inoculation trials were based on the idea that if you introduced some like a low level of rabies to a living being. Yeah. 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. And he was 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. Sure. Maybe that'll help cure it. Yeah. And I think I think that was around for a while.

But yeah, I think it was like some arcane knowledge that not everyone knew about and pasture really capitalized. Pretty amazing. But he actually you had been working on something using rabbits as test cases and was basically he proved it can work in humans, but by a boy who had been attacked by a dog, I think, and contracted rabies. Yeah. And Louis Pasteur said, here goes nothing.

And that stuck in with the shot.

And the parents went, here goes nothing. Right? He goes, No, nothing. And they said, well, you said this is going to work. I said, no such thing. It's good. Louis Pasteur, thank you. It's technically that the Texas or know the Chuck Jones version of Napoleon.

Right. And Bugs Bunny used to hang out with them. Oh, yeah. That's how I learned to do a French accent, Chuck. The great Chuck Jones, sure. Uh, so maybe 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. Yeah, it is part of the Raboteau everyday.

Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Family under the genus. You take the genus the Lysa virus. And that was too easy.

It was easy and it shaped like a bullet. And when it comes in the body, it basically goes as fast as it can. Like a bullet to the spinal cord. Yeah. Through something called afferent nerves with an A.. They carry impulses toward the central nervous system as opposed to efferent 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 central nervous system, the spinal cord and then up to the brain. Yeah, 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, your brain cells, which is not a good place for a virus to start doing. It's 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 the stuff is wrecking your brain by hijacking your brain cells and destroying them, there's two different versions of rabies, right? Yeah. Encephalitic, 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. It's hallucinating and running around in circles and chasing its tail and biting at the air. Right. Old Yeller basically, although they toned it down a bit, they did because they didn't want to scare the kids before they shot the kid. Yeah.

And then there's a paralytic or dumb form, and that one is more like lapsing into a coma, basically. Right. 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 it's destroying brain cells. Yeah, I would think it would just be totally accidental. Probably there it went toward the encephalitic or the 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's that is the for a very for millennia, the the the idea behind rabies is like it was it's a fatal disease, 100 percent fatal. Yeah. Except now they've started to find a few cases here. There. That's not the case. And it's they're starting to wonder, OK, is this something we could treat right after people are traditionally goners? Well, that's a great tease. So let's take a break and we'll come back right after this with more on rabies stuff, Joshua.

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OK, so we mentioned the two forms, they are both in the acute stage and, uh, apparently both stages can happen in a single case. It's not necessarily one or the other. It makes sense. Yeah.

Like if this region of your brain is wrecked in, you're furious and raging, well, eventually it's going to get to the part of your brain where you like. You can't move or breathe and you slip into a coma and die of respiratory distress.

Right. You know, but also got the impression it wasn't necessarily like that's the path. Like it could 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 it 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. You one of the one of the traits of a symptom 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, 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 Hallmark's.

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 be recognized in the neighborhood during the day. Yeah, just go get your paws. B.B. Gun. Well, I don't know about that, but call Animal Control and they'll get their B.B. gun. Sure. But yeah, this little boy was was this raccoon jumped on his back and started biting his face and neck. Where did you learn to pronounce words? Raccoon. Raccoon n I reckon that's just one of my jokes. OK, people don't know though.

When I said Alec Baldwin, I know people literally wrote in were like, no, I'm with you, Chuck, it's Alec.

How would you miss 30 Rock?

And Alec Baldwin said, I don't care. Yeah, I don't know who this Chuck is. So anyway, um, Clint Eastwood. Yeah, you're right. The little boy I think is going to be OK, which is the good news. Good. But it's well, we'll get to the rarity of it. Well, plus, he was attacked in New Jersey, which is in the U.S., which means he's going to be just fine. Right.

But a 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 they're small and probably won't survive. Like they could very well get rabies. Every sign says they can. Yeah, but they'll probably put a little mouse approaches die.

Right, because of a raccoon gets its hands on a mouse. It's all over 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. If their neck is broken and they're dead, then that it's not going to work. But yeah, absolutely.

But what you said, yes, you can get a woodchuck with 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 larger, slightly larger small mammals. Does that make sense? Yeah, Woodchucks Racoons, medium sized mammals, medium size on the smaller side, small to medium, a medium sized mammal. That means like a. I guess Oricon, OK, and it takes a few months for the disease to run its course 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, though. The rabies virus is one of the scariest viruses on the planet. It is. Um, 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 this year 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 to your finger, you could also catch it even more uncommon. But if you came across a raccoon's poop that was rabid and he took it and just rubbed it all over your hands, the camouflage, the scent of your hand, 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. He the BP. Uh oh, man.

It's been pee at my house. You want a little quick side story? Should I change the litter box before I went to Birmingham and four days later we realized that I didn't put litter in the litter box, 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 was it. Hey, honey. Yeah, uh, 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 were working just fine.

And 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 on my lower back of Alfred E. Newman.

So anyway, we've been in you're in land. That's so gross. It is so gross.

And Cappie is not you know, it's tough to mask.

So we're we're really are working on it, man. Now what a dummy. So 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. What's it called. What's the cat disease from changing litter. Oh, toxoplasmosis gone. I'm sure I've had that for years.

Um, it's why you do most of the things you do. That's right. So it is a very adaptive disease. And here's another scary thing. Although it's not that scary because 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, someone got rabies supposedly to the air. Three people, three people walked into the cave in Texas. But that's, 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, a rabid person.

And remember, it can take months, if not years for the symptoms to set on. You could conceivably catch rabies from that. You can also catch it as an STD through sexual contact, they believe.

Sure. This is the CDC theorizing at this point, there's no documented cases.

Right. And then you could also conceivably catch it from like sharing a cigarette with somebody or drinking after somebody using the same glass. Again, in theory, any transmission of shared saliva.

But here's the scariest one to me. 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, I'm one of the problems. Do you think?

Well, how could that possibly happen? Apparently rabies is very hard to detect. Yeah. And the main places to detect it, remember, it doesn't show up in your blood or anything like that.

I know you're under feces is in the saliva and in the brain. Well, yeah. 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 of an animal has beat your child is they capture it and they cut its head off. Yeah. And inspect the brain. Right. That's horrifying. It is. But unfortunately, like necessary, I guess, of a raccoon bite 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 sorry, your head is cut off. Yeah. Like, imagine being the clinician who did that kind of bum 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 everybody knows through popular culture and things like Old Yeller that the foaming at 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, and here are some of the symptoms, partially or fully paralyzed animal. Right. 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 percent of this.

Was she really like PXP, strange behaviors like snapping at the air or turning in circles? Lucy did that.

Nocturnal animals who wander during the day. Like I said, if you see a raccoon walking around during the day, it's not a good sign. No drool excessively, Lucy drawled. Wild animals who show no fear of humans, 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? Yeah, no, obviously disoriented. Lucy And then a change in voice, which I thought was strange.

She was like, sure of the Cold War. Uh, 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 the most. Right. 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 comes through bats more frequently.

Yeah, that's the big the big daddy these days.

So if you get like a hundred bats or 100 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. And bats also have very tiny teeth. Yeah. 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, okay.

So they can kill it.

So then they can kill it for you, they can do your dirty work for you.

But the, the reason why is because bats 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. Yeah. But you may have contracted rabies in that case. Yeah. See our excellent episode on bats.

Yeah. Which was good to say because they bats are wonderful. Yeah. I remember we just came like bat crazy over that one. Yeah. Very bat friendly podcast. Yeah.

So don't kill bats as a matter of fact. Just look the other way if you see a bat and if 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 it might be rabid, there will be isolated for ten days and if they make it through that ten days, then you're home free. 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 you behind the barn and shoot it. Yeah, I mean, I would call that more humane.

Sure. But in, you know, rural Texas, they might be like, no, that's quick and easy and painless. Yeah, just like the shot. What, the lethal injection, yeah, I'm sure that's what they call it in Texas. OK, all right. Let's take a break then. I'm going to get your stuff together, get my stuff together, and we'll come back with more rabies stuff with the Joshua.

Took you ever been to Bali? No, you haven't. Neither have I. OK, 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.

Yeah. 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 take in out Hawaii.

No, that's why she would be. But no, we basically she would get out of quarantine about the time we were Gocha. So but my in-laws moved and they took their dogs with them and why. Yeah, it was a big deal. Yeah. I'm sure.

But emboli specifically, they were rabies free until 2008 and some dogs contracted rabies somehow. And 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. 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 doesn't harm humans or dogs to write 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. Yes, 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., rabies vaccination push among pets has really lowered that. Yeah.

That in the 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 required by law was pretty sensible. Yeah.

If you have a pet you should have a non rabid pet. Yeah. Like you would say. No, no I don't, I don't want my dog getting that rabies boner. I would say that probably. So uh, this is the most recent stat we have in twenty six point zero one one percent of all rabies cases in the United States were almost feline were canine. 11000 of a percent. Yeah, so that's virtually nil, and I believe, um, 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. Yeah. And then 24 percent of all US wildlife rabies cases are bats. Yeah. Which led to in 2006, two of the three rabies related deaths were from bat transmission's bat bites. Yes, not good, actually, let me I spoke wrong that it wasn't in 2006, it was only since 1995. Oh gosh, 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 one of the most most neglected, one of the most neglected among neglected diseases.

There's still 30000 to 70000 people who die every year. It's around one every 10 minutes. Yeah, from rabies in the developing world. Think about that. In the United States, three people died in 2006. That was a bad year. Yeah, 70000 people, as much as 70000 people around the world are dying from rabies. And these are 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 the 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 pasture came up with the rabies vaccine. And basically his technique has been only slightly altered over the years. It's still a series of shots in the United States or the West. The ones that we have are five shots in the arm 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 in what of the guy in the in the email say for the last the last listener mail, instead of developing lower income countries in lower income countries, they 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, missed some work.

So it's a big problem. Yeah, you mentioned Pasta's brilliant idea. He use 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 built up the immunity. Yeah.

Hooray.

Yeah, uh, there are some 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 Reede, Rabies in the Americas and rabies free rabies free world are both working to eradicate rabies elsewhere.

Yeah, and if you have been bitten by a animal that you are worried about, um, I would just immediately, you know, if I got bitten by a squirrel or something.

Yeah. 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, uh, it's a little sting. Oh, well, let's see what happens. Yeah.

Uh, 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 then went to the doctor.

Right. Well, here are some of the symptoms in humans, humans, human beings, not human beings are Bériot.

You rabid stomach pain is the change in personality anxiety. I'm also biting at the air. Stomach pains, anxiety, restlessness, fever. Do you have any of this? No increased aggression, sore throat, uh, excessive saliva, hallucinations, delirium. If that's happening, you are really like should go to the doctor. Yeah. Coma, sporadic pulse.

Therefore, 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 is hydrophobia and used to mean the same thing. And then why? What's the deal with hydrophobia? It's a it's an intense, unreasonable fear of water that develops from rabies symptoms, apparently. Yeah.

Because I think drinking is, uh, you have a very violent, painful spasms and responses to trying to swallow water. Right. 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. Yeah, 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 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 like the last few years, I think the the common conventional wisdom was if you if rabies got to your central nervous system. Yeah. Bye bye. Yeah. We might as well old yellow you because you're not going to survive and you're going to die. What are the worst deaths we could think of. Yeah.

And it wasn't until 2004 when the lucky lady.

Yeah. Gina, Gina guys I thought you can say Gina Gershon. No, it's like oh that's what happened to her.

Gina guys, she was a girl, a teenager in Wisconsin who was bitten by a bat, I think. And some doctors said you're a goner. Yeah. I'm not going to give up on you, Gina. No way. No how to 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 the rabies infection.

Amazing.

So she survived the rabies infection without being inoculated previously. Yeah. And apparently without the inoculation being given to her in a rapid enough time. Right. 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. Yeah. And there is a study in Peru and in the Andes, a lot of Peruvian groups live near Bashur if to deal with bats.

Yeah. And apparently some Peruvians have developed immunity to rabies.

And being around, they documented, I think, about a dozen Peruvians who survived rabies without any inoculations. Wow. So they're saying, OK, this isn't a 100 percent 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 there, getting exposed to it gradually.

I don't know. I don't know if that would make these people have been bitten before or if some sort of inoculation was passed down to them through heredity. Yeah. You know, like, I don't I'm not sure, like, Grandpappy was strong against the rabies. Right. So I am right. That's how genes work.

All right. From nineteen fifties to the roughly mid 1980s, the horror stories were true.

You did get like upwards of twenty to twenty three 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, but makes sense. Apparently after you start having these shots somewhere between 10 and 20, you start having really bad reactions and inflammation and 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. Right. So I don't know if that's true or not. That makes sense. It definitely does. And we have to mention Ozzy Osborne. What, biting the head off a bat? Yeah, it wasn't a live bat, you know. Well, there's different stories. He swears up and down. It wasn't a 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 a big fan, that through the bat on stage said it was dead. Aussie. Aussie, right? It was. That's a good Aussie. Uh, thank you.

But that is not an old. He also bit the head off a pigeon at a party, but he thought the bat was a toy, apparently did bite the bat 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. So 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. It'd be kind of neat to be like, go ahead and buy me a raccoon, you crazy raccoon. I'm fine. And then you could continue your ongoing battle with your squirrels, your.

Yeah, porch deck squirrels know the squirrels. One I had to take down the bird feeder you just gave up.

No, the condo complex is like you're not allowed to have those squirrels. I'm like, yeah, no doubt the squirrels. I know. So I say they're fine. Anything else? Nope, rabies, if you want to know more about it, type that word into the search bar HowStuffWorks dot com r a b y. S, and it will bring up this awesome article. I know. I know. I'm just teasing that it's really not spelled that way.

Arabia. Yes, that's right. All right. Did you say the. Oh, I misspelled something. It's time for the listener mail. I'm going to call this cringeworthy experience. Oh, God, why did we ask you? Hey, guys, 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 your body or your face become parallel to the water surface when you're going around a bend in a river. So when that happens, you could experience what happened to my dad. His face skimmed 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 to have your eyeball outside of your head.

Hope that is still attached.

Like my dad's eyeball was magic up river water in his eye socket. Like I said, 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.

And his name is John Rambo. As 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, that'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 Lena or Lena in California, the California boy. I don't know. Her dad has made of some tough stuff, but he did not go to a doctor. He's like hero or not, I would seem Ohia. Yeah. So did somebody else wrote in and got me about having to get shots, like up their nose.

Good. 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 all old river water socket, Jimmy.

Yeah, that's a mouthful. If you have a cringe worthy story, skip it yourself. Send us something else in via tweet to sway as podcast or join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff. You know, send us an email to stuff podcast of how stuff works, dot com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuff, you know, dot com. Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, my radio is the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.