Bitten by Myth: Unraveling Rabies and the Werewolf Tale

One Health And Show Welcome

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This is a podcast about one health. The idea that the health of humans, animals, plants, and the environment that we all share are intrinsically linked.

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Coming to you from the University of Texas Medical Branch and the Galveston National Laboratory.

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This is Infectious Science, where enthusiasm for science is contagious.

Meet The Hosts And Guests

SPEAKER_01 0:33

Welcome back, everybody, to the Infectious Science Podcast. I think today we're gonna have a very interesting episode for you guys. It's a very unique topic. I'm super excited. I'm here today with Camille Adu. Hi, Camille.

SPEAKER_04 0:47

Hi, very excited to be here with you all. I'm a third-year PhD student. I work in a neuroscience lab, and I'm really excited to get into today's episode.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

Okay, and before we started recording this episode, we were talking about your book fascination. How many books have you read per week?

SPEAKER_04 1:04

I read about 10 books per month, about 60 hours a month when I did my last kind of recording of how much time do I spend reading.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

And now those science books.

SPEAKER_04 1:12

I read everything. If I'm like reading, it's usually fiction, but if I'm listening to an audiobook, I listen to a lot of nonfiction. So I'm listening to I Contain Multitudes by Ed Young right now, which is about basically our entire microbiome. It's really cool.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Cool. We have Christina here. Hey Christina. House Life in med school.

SPEAKER_03 1:31

It's good. It's going. Still a second year medical student, but it's good. Can't complain.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Oh yes, you can. So it's a good thing. Is it true that the second year is worse than the first year? What would you tell the people getting into medicine?

SPEAKER_03 1:47

Second year, I honestly think there's a lot of work because you're established now. You're you maybe have your hand in a lot of jars. So you're doing research on the side. Now you're obviously still in school, you're shadowing on the side. And so it's just a lot of different facets versus first year, you're getting used to the curriculum, getting used to being in medical school. So maybe in that aspect, it's a little bit trickier. But I think that the curriculum itself, at least in our school, is it feels more organized because now you're done with your general classes and you're focused on organ-based systems. And it's just fun learning that we're here to do that. So it's fun finally getting feeling like you're learning more about the actual body and the pathophysiology of things.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

All right. We'll talk again in a year. Let's see how the third year is. Third year is gonna be fun.

SPEAKER_03 2:40

It's coming. It's intense.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

All

Why Folklore Sticks To Disease

SPEAKER_01 2:43

right. So today we have a cool topic, and it's going to be folklore and disease. And this comes from Camille. Camille is just a never-ending uh resource of ideas, of topics here for us. And if you guys, as listeners, have any topic ideas that you want us to cover, then leave us a note or send us a message, a smoke signal, a snail mail, whatever you want to do to reach us. So, Camille, tell us what we're doing today.

SPEAKER_04 3:11

Yeah. So to start off with, we're gonna talk about rabies and werewolves, which I think is a really cool topic to dive into. Your eyes got really big when I first brought this up as a topic. But I think just to set this up, so basically when I was in college, I studying infectious disease biology, but I'd always had this really strong love of like mythology and folklore. And what was really interesting is I found how much they overlapped, particularly if you think about the stories that we tell around disease parallel a lot of the folklore that is out there. And so what's interesting um is that the these stories and folklore can like influence kind of care and and treatment of patients. So I think it's a really cool topic to dive into.

Rabies Biology Behind Werewolves

SPEAKER_04 3:53

So a great example of this is rabies. So rabies is a virus that infects the brain. And it really is quite fascinating. There's a good amount of scholarship on this that it likely informed and helped perpetuate the werewolf myth, which I think is so cool. You're probably familiar with rabies. If you have pets, you likely vaccinate your pets, or you we hope you do. We want you to vaccinate your pets for rabies if you don't already.

SPEAKER_03 4:16

At least against rabies.

SPEAKER_04 4:18

At least at least against rabies. And the reason we vaccinate pets for rabies is because they can come in contact with wild animals on pretty much every continent, except possibly Antarctica, carry rabies or can carry rabies. So it's out there. It's pretty much ubiquitously spread around the world, which is also interesting because a lot of diseases are only endemic to certain regions, right? So what's cool about rabies is that it's everywhere and therefore likely could have played a role in a lot of different myths, which is really interesting. Rabies is transmitted by an infected bite. You can see how this is already starting to parallel the werewolf lycanthropy type of thing. But I think what's interesting is that it's probably possible that if you grew up in like a suburban or a rural area, that you probably received education as a kid of like how to interact safely with wild animals. And it probably included don't touch bats, don't touch animals that might more likely be rabid. And so it's what really might surprise you is that education like this has been going on for a really long time as folk tales. So if you think of pretty much any werewolf story you've like ever heard is you've or read or in in any way come in contact with, it probably had several themes that are repeated across pretty much every version. So if you've seen a movie, whatever. So a person gets really close to the wild, right? There's an interaction. You are, you know, going out hiking, werewolf of London style. They end up getting bitten, right? That's like the next thing. And then third step is they transform in like really horrible ways, possibly going out like crazy and attacking others, but only after a certain amount of time. And sometimes they're like, oh, it's like a moon cycle or whatever. And so what's interesting is that there's like a lot of these folkloric themes really actually do resemble the spread and progression of rabies. So humans' only real risk of rabies comes from infected animals. And at least according to the CDC, when I was looking into this, 90% of reported animals' rabies occurs in wildlife. So really, where you're getting rabies from, that means we do a pretty good job vaccinating pets, is that you're coming in contact with wildlife that is rabid. They end up getting bit, right? That's how rabies is spread. It has to be a bite. And what's interesting is that there's always that kind of like lag time where like in world stories, it's like they don't turn to the next full moon. What's interesting about rabies is that the symptoms only occur after a pretty prolonged incubation time. So like uh not a full moon cycle per se, but that's because the rabies virus has to travel to the brain to cause symptoms. The brain is for many reasons not super easily accessible because we evolved to be that way, right? We don't want just anything coming in contact with our central nervous system because it's a very important system to protect.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

So it's immunoprivileged. So if it's a bite to the face, it's obviously travels faster.

SPEAKER_04 6:55

Yeah, absolutely. Totally correct in that. And so what's interesting is like to us, as you're saying, we might measure it as 21 days or to weeks, but like back in the day, if you were just, I don't know, you were looking at like your time schedule as the moon. And so, like that again might be how this ended up being linked, which I think is really interesting. I just also wanted to dive into the symptoms of rabies, which are are pretty wild. If you've never looked them up. So, like it starts with weakness, discomfort, fever, headache, which is like very general. But once it gets to the brain, it causes anxiety, insomnia, delirium, hallucinations, seizures, extreme salvation, fear of water. Yeah. Like those are very intense symptoms. That all sounds a lot like the post-werewolf scenes I've seen on TV. And so you hear it here first, Hollywood. I'm looking for scientifically accurate folklore archetypes. Everything that I think it's interesting that how when you start to have CNS symptoms, that can definitely start to play into folklore, right? Where like someone is acting very out of the ordinary, and we need a reason and a way to explain that.

SPEAKER_03 7:51

And it's really hard to explain that too, because when something's in the CNS, it's obviously hard to understand what it is that's affecting the individual as well.

SPEAKER_04 7:59

Yes, absolutely. And so I think what's interesting is that there's a lot of stories about this, and a lot of them really come down to like how close are we getting to the wild and like where's this sort of line between like human and animal? And that is really what defines rabies, but also what defines something like a werewolf myth. And there's an associate professor at the University of British Columbia who has written really extensively on the subject in a book that was called Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers, rabies Medicine and Society in an American metropolis from 1840 to 1920, about this thin line dividing human and animals. And so she also had an essay of rabies' horrifying symptoms inspired folktales of werewolves. So one of the first things that came up when I started to research for this, which was really interesting, and it really made me consider what happens when we step outside of the sort of boundaries of societal expectations, and how I think that's where a lot of fear comes from when we think about a lot of different types of diseases, right? There's certain expectations around how people act or safety or things like that, or that sort of give us like this anxiety factor. And I feel like that really is a defining characteristic of a lot of the social stories that surround infectious disease.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

Back to your description of the clinical signs.

How Rabies Behaves In Animals

SPEAKER_01 9:13

For me as a virologist, what always fascinated me when I first learned about rabies is that the clinical signs in animals vary depending on what species of animal gets infected. This is a rule of thumb. So it's not always 100% accurate, but it's just a very broad assessment that works. So if for example, if an herbivore gets infected, they typically or typically the clinical signs are more that the animal becomes slow and lethargic and it loses its fear of predators. So it makes it easier for the infected uh herbivore to become prey.

SPEAKER_03 9:55

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 9:56

Can you imagine a cow or a goat who usually is afraid of seeing a wolf or a fox or a predator in general all of a sudden becoming slow and lethargic and not running away? And the with carnivores, it's the opposite. It's they present these typical signs that we always associate with rabies, like this showing their teeth, this aggressiveness and excessive salivation and so on. The interesting thing is that a lot of virus is also secreted through the saliva. So it always gives you the impression that the virus knows what it's doing, right? It knows how it's being transmitted from one animal to the next the best way. So on the one side, it's making the prey uh more docile, the herbivores, the prey animals, and it's making the carnivores more aggressive, biting, and thus secreting the virus through the saliva. And that's helping the virus spread from one animal to the next, being transmitted through the saliva. So you think that the virus does this by coincidence, or you do you think the virus has a brain and knows all of these things? Isn't it a cool coincidence? Obviously, it's evolution, right? Yeah. But it's just really fascinating.

SPEAKER_04 11:17

Absolutely. Yeah. And I I think it's really it's interesting how the these things occur, and then we always create stories to like fit kind of the unexplainable aspects. And I think that's a a really cool area to look at, especially switching gears.

Modern Disease Narratives And Fear

SPEAKER_04 11:32

It's something that in today's day and age, like the stories that we tell around infections are super important, very impactful. The narratives that surround medicine and infectious diseases and health can really make or break whether or not someone seeks care, their safety, the safety of their community. And these stories are not something that we should discount. Like it might sound very just like we're going off into the realm of science fiction to talk about rabies and werewolves. But what I think is important that I just want to situate this in context, that I think it's cool to talk about these things. One, they're interesting, but two, that it's important that we learn how these narratives are constructed and what it tells you about what people are afraid of, right? What you can tell from something like a werewolf myth is people were afraid of getting too close to the wild, like getting outside of civilization, and then something terrible happens. And that's a pretty real fear, right? If we don't have access to all the resources we need, we can very quickly get in trouble. But I think if you think even more today of the narratives that surrounded something like COVID-19, they tell stories around what people fear is being threatened. I worked as a COVID-19 contact tracer, and something interesting that came up a lot is that there was this very much strong emotion that came up in a lot of people on protecting themselves as an individual versus looking at a wider community standpoint. And so the stories that were told around COVID, I think do reflect that. And so I don't know if either of you have other kind of examples to comment on, but I think it's something that comes up pretty consistently. Where like the stories that were told around HIV in the 80s were very much showed this fear that people thought originally of it as a very morally unclean disease, which is obviously very much not true, but that was a way of separating themselves from their own kind of anxiety around contracting it, especially when it we didn't know how it was spread.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

I don't think I have a story or an example, but as you were talking about the folklore behind it, I was thinking about the fact that a lot of the folklore that we have and the fairy tales as well, all of those things emerged when we didn't have TV or the internet, uh, we didn't have cell phones, and we lived in smaller groups in fairly rural areas. Yeah. So these stories were probably all told around the fireplace at night, whether your family or your tribe and or your group of people, and maybe it was to warn everybody and or the family or the community or the tribe, because there's always some sort of a takeaway message from folklore and from fairy tales. Do you think this still applies nowadays? Talking to you, Christina, as a millennial? Are you millennial? I don't even know.

SPEAKER_03 14:15

I I'm right on the border of millennial and Gen Z, and I am fully siding on the millennial side. Well, I'm a proud Gen Z, so you are gonna be excited about that. I know you are. I'll let you represent the Gen Zers here. I just I think that it's probably not as prevalent in today's society, but I do think that there are still storytellers out there. And I think that sometimes that's what sets apart really great art nowadays from maybe just your common blockbusters, blockbuster hits and things like that, right? Is what is the actual value behind what you're putting out there, behind the videos that you're putting out there, behind the podcasts that you're putting out there. What's the value behind that? So maybe in a strange way, podcasts are our version of sitting around the fire, having that chat. I think it's still out there. I just don't know if it's as prevalent as it was before.

SPEAKER_04 15:17

I think stories that perpetuated before we had such connectivity were stories that were too important not to pass on. Does that make sense? Nowadays, like anyone can tell any story. Like we have a lot more niche stories, I think, out there. If you want to get into a certain hobby or like a certain topic, like there's so many things that you can explore that are so easily at your fingertips. Where I think previously the stories that continued to get passed down or told or written or in any way recorded were the ones that were just like it was a either it was either like a really dominant group or that was able to just write the narrative, or it was in the case of something like uh here's a folklore that also ties into your safety, like the werewolf myth, like too important not to pass on, right? There can be consequences if we're getting too close to like wild animals, that kind of thing. And so I think that's the difference between stories that were told then than that are told now, is that I think the stories that are told now are still important, but they might be important to a smaller subset of people. Like they might be interesting or intriguing to like a small subset of population that wants to explore this or that.

Storytelling That Fuels Misinformation

SPEAKER_01 16:20

My second question for both of you is first of all, I think our brains have the desire to listen to stories. And people always say, if you want to make information stick, tell it as a story. So do you think that in our fast-paced world with so much information, so many things popping up on your cell phone and so on, do you think that this urge from our brain to to listen to stories that fascinate the brain can be abused by aka misinformation?

SPEAKER_03 16:55

That's an interesting question.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Because you have the brain's desire to investigate something, to see something, to hear something interesting or an interesting story, and you maybe don't get the full story of the werewolf from the beginning to the end, but you can still discuss the key messages with your people, right? It's even if you just get 15 seconds, if it's a good story.

SPEAKER_04 17:19

Yeah, I certainly think our attention span has the capacity to be abused in that kind of way. And also, I've never looked into the, I guess, the truthiness of this, but I have heard that the first time you hear like a certain way, say you see something reported in the news a certain way, even if you later see that contradicted, it will still stick in your brain that you originally saw that it presented from this point of view. And so that's why misinformation is so dangerous. That's what I've heard at least. And I think that in that instance, yeah, the storytelling aspect of this is very sensational. Or if we think about something like the one paper that was published with falsified data saying that vaccines cause autism, and that has had such reverberating impacts, even to today's day and age, that like regardless if it was retracted, regardless of anything. Oh, it's so false, but it's still out there and it's a story that people still tell. And it was maybe the first story as well. And so it doesn't matter if you see it retracted. There's always this kind of I read it this way first. Is that actually what's true? And I think this is just I've never lived without internet, right? Like I'm 25. Like I've never I've always had that's the age I grew up in, right? Like there was always this interconnection and this very fast, quick, I can text somebody, I can email them. Like we always carried a phone, like that kind of stuff. So I don't, I can't fathom what it was like before that because it's just not my lived experience. But I think that it's one of those things where you end up sort of with like all these, as you're saying, like little bits of information, and you don't necessarily have the attention span for the full story. And that is pretty scary in the world we live in today because so much counts on getting it right. And I'm not sure that we are really set up in a way, in the way that we've grown like online presences and interconnectivity, it's very difficult to sort through and find out what's real and what's not. And so I think that also is part of storytelling that like you can bring people in. Is anyone really checking the ferocity of their news or something like that?

SPEAKER_01 19:15

Yeah. So Camille, do you have more of folklore?

SPEAKER_04 19:19

We definitely have more to talk about.

Why Rabies Turns Deadly

SPEAKER_04 19:21

But I also just wanted to quickly touch on just back to rabies, because this is infectious science. I think it's important to note that every, even today, worldwide, thousands of people still die of rabies every year, which is insane.

SPEAKER_03 19:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 19:34

Yeah, really wild. And so also once symptoms of rabies appear, it's essentially incurable and it's almost always fatal. And I think we should talk about a little bit like why that is. I don't know if you want to get into it from a virology standpoint or like from a medical student standpoint, but either we want to go.

SPEAKER_03 19:50

I guess first off, Dennis, like virology-wise, do you know how the virus necessarily infects our CNS? So once it gets in there, do you know what it does?

SPEAKER_01 20:00

First of all, I think I heard you say you get bitten somewhere and then it replicates locally in in the muscle tissues, but then it will find a nerve close by, close to the muscle tissues, and it will travel from the nerve to the CNS, the central nervous system, through the spinal cord, and then into the brain.

SPEAKER_03 20:23

By the way, for those who aren't l or who aren't aware and are listening, CNS means central nervous system. Yes, it's not a colour.

SPEAKER_01 20:29

So that's your spinal cord, your brain. It travels from the place where you've bitten to your spinal column, and then it goes into the brain. And so once it's in the brain, it just it's just very good at at taking out these key cells in in your brain, destroying parts of the cells in your brain. And those are mostly the cells that inhibit or suppress certain processes. And that's why all of the things become exaggerated and and convulgents and and symptoms and signs like that, right? Just as a side note, one interesting sign of rabies, especially not only in humans, but also in animals, is the fear of water. Right? Yeah. And as you mentioned, the hydrophobia.

SPEAKER_04 21:14

It's not silver. You need a moat.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

And that's just amazing. What parts of the brain really control this fear of water?

SPEAKER_03 21:24

So I think what actually happens is that it causes rabies somehow causes really painful throat spasms, from what I've heard. And so the drinking of the water, the idea of swallowing the water, of even swallowing food or anything like that, brings on that fear. So I think that's Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:42

And I think the cause of death is often, besides the obviously respiratory failure, right, and or heart failure or something like that, is often that the animals just stop eating and drinking. Yeah. They just succumb to dehydration and lack of nutrition.

SPEAKER_04 21:59

Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's really interesting. As someone who works in a neuroscience lab, I always think effects on the brain are really fascinating. And I don't know, something I want to see in again, I want scientifically accurate folklore archetypes. Um I want to see like a the stereotypical werewolf movie where somebody gets bit, they and then there's it's like the whole descent into to wolfiness and all that stuff. And then the twist at the end is that it's a person who's been bitten and has rabies and they're just hallucinating that they're a werewolf because it's such a like it's like zombies, like everybody's familiar with it. And it's something that's in your brain, right? So it's just there. So I don't know. That's the werewolf movie I want to watch.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

It's interesting. It's mostly in the brain, but it's like I said, it's also spreads to the salivary glands.

SPEAKER_03 22:40

Right.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

Can also be found in the cornea of the eye. Oh wow. Which I thought was always very interesting. So the reason why I'm telling you this is in veterinary medicine, you typically do rabies diagnostic on brain samples, and the animal has to be euthanized, obviously, in order to do and to find the virus there and diagnose the virus there. Yeah. But there have also been attempts to look at the cornea, which you can obviously access in a live animal, and it's in just an easier access for sampling. So you can do antibody tests on the cornea of the animal.

SPEAKER_04 23:15

There was a case. I actually was speaking to someone who used to run a lot of transplants, and it was really interesting. I got chatting with him, and there was a case where they took, so there was a an organ donor passed away. They transplanted, I believe, to different people, and all of them got rabies. They backtracked it. Turned out this person, this guy had been bitten before he passed away, and they gave all of them rabies.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

Oh, what am I saying? So a point against your severe clinical presentation here, right? Yes. Because I don't think that every case is typically the usual mag going crazy, convulsions, biting like crazy kind of presentation, right? There's always a spectrum of disease. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 24:00

And I also just want to note that now, because of something like this, and this happened years ago, transplants are heavily screened. Heavily screened. So this isn't something that like, I don't want anyone to like be afraid of contracting disease through organ transplantation or something like that. Because it's this happened many years ago and systems always improve, but it's certainly something now that I think that there's probably a lot more leariness of the circumstances around a death before they're willing to um do organ transplantation to other people. I just want to throw that out there as a side note. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:32

Don't be fearful.

SPEAKER_04 24:33

But do be mindful of wild animals. Be afraid of that.

SPEAKER_03 24:36

That's fair.

SPEAKER_04 24:37

But be mindful. I also wouldn't recommend bat tourism just to anyone.

SPEAKER_01 24:40

I just one thing that speaks against your theory is that yes, it's definitely found in wolves, and wolves are a very important host for the disease.

SPEAKER_04 24:51

Yeah. And the transmission And they're extremely susceptible.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

Yes. But in different places of the world, you also have different animals that play roles. For example, in the US, it can also infect raccoons and bats, foxes, skunks, and so on. So in other parts of the world, straight pets, especially in urban places, it's feral dogs. They are the main reservoir of disease.

SPEAKER_03 25:16

I've seen a rabid feral dog. It is very scary. I actually saw when I worked in clinic at the veterinary uh specialty hospital, we had a patient who came in with rabies. Wow. And I yeah, and I jokingly stated as I passed this patient's kennel, he was isolated. I was like, wow, that dog looks like he has rabies. Because it was the rabid rabies. He was frothing at the mouth, he was going crazy in his kennel and was barking. And I everyone was like, nope, he's just a crazy dog. Like he's been having seizures or whatever, and he's just an aggressive dog. So I didn't think anything of it because it was obviously we took the precautions that we needed to. But later on I found out, yeah, that that dog passed and he had rabies. And that was pretty crazy.

SPEAKER_01 26:01

Do you know the story of how the virus was or the vaccine for the uh disease was discovered and what the background was?

SPEAKER_03 26:11

You know what? I think what had happened was that the dog was out and then he just started acting strange. But he was a pet of a family, and unfortunately, I do think that he ended up biting one of the family members. I really hope and pray that that family member is fine now, but I do remember that was something that had happened, but it just shows how quickly and rapidly the disease can progress.

SPEAKER_04 26:34

I think that brings up a good point to touch on.

Vaccines And Post Exposure Protection

SPEAKER_04 26:37

Let's talk about post-exposure for rabies, because that's now available. I know people who have had to get that because they've been bitten by like a stray animal or a wild animal. Could you talk to us a little bit about how that works?

SPEAKER_01 26:49

First of all, the vaccine for rabies is probably the the second oldest vaccine that we have.

SPEAKER_04 26:56

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 26:57

We had smallpox vaccine, the whole Jenna story. I think many people know this. But Louis Pasteur worked on rabies on the rabies vaccine by inoculating ra rabbits with rabies and maintaining or perpetuating the virus in ra rabbit brains. Rabid rabbits. And then say that five times. Yeah. I I don't think they had rabbits. Okay. And then you remove the brain and you dry it, and then you treat it with acetone or formalin or something like that. And that's what you then eject into or inject into a host as a vaccine. The killed tissue or the killed virus in the tissue. That's one of our earliest vaccines.

SPEAKER_04 27:44

So it would just be like a early, like killed vaccine, basically. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

But it works. And a version of this vaccine is currently still being used. Typically, humans and animals nowadays get the inactivated vaccine. So where the virus is killed and wildlife gets an attenuated live vaccine. So that means that you grow the virus in a hostile environment that cripples the virus. And so this produces a virus that can is crippled. Like I said, it can still replicate, but it's not able to produce full-blown disease. But it causes a strong immune response. And wild animals only has to have to be exposed to it once. So you don't need repeated vaccinations with an inactivated vaccine. And that's enough for lifelong immunity against it. They have been tools in our arsenal for a long time.

SPEAKER_03 28:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

Yeah. And the post-exposure is because the virus takes such a long time to travel from the bright side to the brain. So there's enough time to trigger the immune system and prepare, almost warn the immune system that the virus is in the body and that the immune system needs to ramp up. And that's why post-exposure works so well for rabies, because we have the time.

SPEAKER_03 29:06

Yeah. And so after a rabies bite, typically what happens is that obviously patients should present to a clinic immediately. Yes. If you know you've been calling incubation too. Exactly. Like the sooner treatment occurs, the better.

SPEAKER_01 29:21

And even if you're not sure if the dog had rabies or not, still go to the doctor.

SPEAKER_03 29:26

Absolutely. Or if you've been bitten by wildlife, please go to the doctor. Of course, we're gonna clean your wound, wash your wound, make sure you're okay in that sense. Then you are oftentimes given antibodies against rabies. So it's human rabi antibodies. So it's immunoglobulins that you're given. And those are that's just basically what an antibody is, is it is an immune cell that, and correct me if I'm wrong, that basically attaches to a bad guy in your body. And then because it's attached, it triggers your body by saying, Hey, this is a bad guy. Like I need this out of my body. So it's really a marker for your immune system. And by giving your body these little markers, you are just helping out your immune system by allowing it to detect the bad guy a little bit quicker than it naturally would on its own. So you're given that, and then you're also given the rabies' vaccination.

SPEAKER_04 30:20

Yeah, I think it's a great summary. Cool. Thank you. What's interesting is it makes me curious, and I'm sure part of it is cost, but is cost the only reason we don't like widely vaccinate wild

Can We Control Rabies In Wildlife

SPEAKER_04 30:32

animals? Because is eradicating it even something that we could potentially consider? Because like almost any mammal could be a reservoir, right?

SPEAKER_01 30:40

I think that's a tricky subject. I think that a lot of things are coming together. First of all, I don't think that the vaccine is super expensive. Sure, it's not cheap, but there there might be some different prices for different areas of the world. And that the price is really hindering the whole development. But I think at the same time, it's also a sad story because we have a vaccine, we have post-exposure treatment, and we have all of those tools in our arsenal available to us, but they're not available in all places of the world where we need them.

SPEAKER_03 31:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:18

There are a bunch of rabies cases around the world, and there's wildferal dog rabies vaccination programs that have been in place and they work. It's been shown. There are many studies that show that they are very effective. It's just not done enough, and the resources are just missing to do these campaigns enough to reduce the cases and get rid of the disease and eventually eradicate the disease. And coming back to your question about wildlife, how do you vaccinate wildlife? How do you reach wildlife, right? It's not easy to catch an animal in the wild and then vaccinate and release. You can't just catch every raccoon or every fox. So people have developed this idea that they just drop baits from planes or just uh from flying over certain areas, and that actually works really well. Because it works and it breaks the transmission cycle in nature, and then people forget about it. So there's not enough follow-up funding to uh maintain these these campaigns, these vaccination campaigns. Yeah, it's interesting, it's it works. We have the tools, but people are just don't use them enough for multiple reasons to eradicate the disease. And for me, rabies was always the one health example. It's always cited in every one health book that you read as like the prime example. Because we have or we can vaccinate animals to protect humans from disease. Yeah. But although we have we too the tools, we're just not using them enough to get get rid of the this very bad and disease, this very deadly disease. So yeah, it's a success, but there's also some failures from us as a community and as a pop as the as a world. I have one more rabies stories that I always thought was really interesting. As you guys know, I got my education in Germany. I went to um a veterinary school in Germany, and in uh in Germany, in Europe in general, we obviously have rabies as well. And the rabies typically come from travels from the eastern uh part of Europe towards the central and the western part of Europe through uh foxes and especially infected wolves. The treatment, the remedy for this is to drop off baits with the vaccine with blisters that contain the vaccine inside it, as I mentioned earlier earlier. It's makes a lot of sense, but uh the stories that we always heard is that the vaccine doesn't work very well in dogs. So let's say you walk your dog, the dog is off the leash and finds one of those blisters in the environment, right? The bait with the blister inside, the dog will obviously eat it and then you can see if the dog reacted to it. That is so smart. And dogs often don't develop the immune response to it than foxes or wolves will do. And apparently, based on some studies, it's not uh uh it's based on the fact the way dogs versus fox, how they eat and how they so dogs often just swallow food whole, whereas foxes will chew on it. And imagine the vaccine is in a blister, and the blister is covered in some food bait that sits on the outside, and the dog will chew on it, and the blister inside is like one of those candy gushers. You bite on it, and the liquid, aka the vaccine, will then come out and will be released into the oral cavity where you have the tonsils and so on, and where the virus then can replicate. Dogs will swallow those blisters whole and just not chew on it, and so it's not the liquid will not, the vaccine will not be released in the oral cavity and will not do its thing in the tonsils. Interesting.

SPEAKER_03 35:18

And not even the gastric juices will, because it's already in the digestive system, so it's not gonna reach the CNS from there. Uh okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

So it's been an interesting story just based on the behavior of the animal.

SPEAKER_03 35:29

Interesting. Wow. Huh. Thank you for that nugget.

Who Gets To Shape The Story

SPEAKER_01 35:35

But I feel like we talked too much about the virus. What about the folklore? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 35:40

That's what we're here for.

SPEAKER_01 35:41

We're not here for the virus.

SPEAKER_04 35:43

Do you have favorite, I don't know, werewolf myths?

SPEAKER_01 35:45

Like, no, but tell me more. What is the folklore and how does the folklore originate?

SPEAKER_04 35:51

Oh, oh my gosh. That's people have entire careers on that.

SPEAKER_03 35:55

It's like, oh wow. You sure you don't want a second PhD here, Camille?

SPEAKER_04 36:01

I think folklore is again, it fits something that needs to be explained, that wasn't easily explainable by other means, but also things that were important enough to pass on. I think that's what like makes the core of a lot of folklore stories. And I think that's why a lot of them have like messages coded in. But I think also something that I had never really thought about, which makes so much sense. But it was in a book I was listening to recently that of course the group that's making the folklore is shaping the folklore, not the other way around. And I guess because of the way like we receive it now, it's easy to pick up like a book of myths or a book of folklore or whatever and see that and then look retroactively at whatever sort of part of the world that was coming from, and then be like, oh, so you see all of these things that sort of uh align with that folklore. And so it's easy to think it went from folklore to people, but of course the people are the ones making the folklore. I don't know if that really pertains, but it's something that had just never really clicked for me until I heard it in an audiobook. Then I was like, oh, of course. Like people, this is something people are are making up, right? It's a way of relating to the world and of also, I think, making up our own sort of psychological security.

SPEAKER_03 37:13

That's a pretty cool way to put it. I I've always found it fascinating reading folklore from cultures that are drastically different than mine because it really does tell a lot about the culture. Yeah. Instead of just the story itself. While some cultures can have, you know, the same general message in a story, their stories are completely different. They have different animals, they have different foods that they present, they have different deities that they present. And I've always found that really fascinating and a really interesting way to learn about a different culture too.

SPEAKER_04 37:45

Yeah, I think you can tell a lot about a group by like the beliefs, whether they're like religious or like it's the stories they're telling or whatever. Like you can tell so much about what was valuable, like what were, or even just like what were the values of that group.

SPEAKER_03 37:59

Yeah, absolutely. When I was an undergrad, I obviously I love English. I was an English minor, but I was incredibly close to choosing a PhD career, going that route in comparative literature, and this was honestly what was sparking my interest was comparing folklores and things of that nature. So yeah, it's fascinating.

SPEAKER_04 38:24

And as time goes on, the stories continue to shift. Think about something like if you look at Egypt, there were like six female pharaohs that we know of, but after they ruled, almost everything was erased. And so what I think it's always important to keep in mind that what we're getting for folklore or myths or stories, it's only what was acceptable to continue passing on. So I think that's also it's not just what was what people valued, but that was part of it too. And the stories had a meaning or needed to be passed on. But if for some reason certain groups got disenfranchised or things like that, and this is also something we see in health, right? I think that those it shifts and who has the power to tell a story makes a really big difference.

SPEAKER_03 39:10

That's for sure true. In everything. Yeah. Who's the narrative coming from? In anything that you're presented with news, stories, folklore, books, anything. Yeah. Definitely. Is there anything else we should discuss? Just

Vampires And Future Folklore Threads

SPEAKER_03 39:24

touching on the folklore of rabies and werewolves. I also did just very minor reading on the connection between vampires and rabies as well. But while vampires are connected to a bunch of different things in folklore, genetic diseases too. Exactly. Possibly explanation. Yeah, anyways, I keep going. Um, I read a little bit about how they could potentially also have been connected to rabies because apparently in original folklore, vampires didn't just turn into bats like we know they did, they do today, or like we know, like we say they do today. Like the destroying cell. Yes. Exactly. They would turn into wolves or rats as well. Rats. Yeah. And so that is pretty interesting. Just thinking about the idea of a vampire with their sharp teeth, obviously, their incredibly dramatic faces that they make. When you think of a vampire, what do you think of? You think of like a snarled face with the teeth exposed, right?

SPEAKER_01 40:21

Glittery skin.

SPEAKER_04 40:25

Are you a Twilight?

SPEAKER_01 40:27

Team Edward.

SPEAKER_04 40:29

Team Edward. Oh my gosh. You're we're in a werewolf and rabies episode. You're supposed to say Team Jacob.

SPEAKER_03 40:35

Oh my gosh. Is Twilight the ultimate rabies? The rabies that we we never knew we needed. I see what you did there. And just to give context about that, before this episode, we were asking Dennis, what kind of vampire would you be? If you were, yeah. And I was pretty confident he was an Edward Cullen vampire with a glittery skin.

SPEAKER_04 40:58

And I was pretty confident he wasn't.

SPEAKER_03 41:04

But yeah, I thought that was pretty interesting too, because that just shows how another folklore that's pretty different from werewolves is potentially based off of something very similar to that of the werewolf narrative. And that just shows how different stories can be created or at least have a root in something similar. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Maybe we can touch on the other stuff that vampires are potentially connected to in the next episode as well.

SPEAKER_04 41:33

Yeah. So we do have more to discuss on how tuberculosis shaped women's beauty standards, which is also fun stories in folklore. And we're gonna get into that next for sure. Yes. But yeah, we there's so many diseases that can be now linked back to diseases that can't be, you know, now linked back to different folklore and myths. Um, but you know, it's uh we want to do this episode because it's also important to think about the stories that we tell about diseases in the present day and the narratives that surround them. So absolutely. Yeah, I love that.

Wrap Up And How To Connect

SPEAKER_02 42:08

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SPEAKER_00 42:19

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SPEAKER_02 42:28

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SPEAKER_00 42:37

So we'll see you next time for a new episode. And in the meantime, stay happy, stay healthy, stay interested.