Offensichtlich geht es bei diesem Thema nur um zukünftige Möglichkeiten – es ist jetzt allgemein fatal, und Wenn Sie befürchten, Tollwut ausgesetzt zu sein, sollten Sie unbedingt sofort eine Postexpositionsprophylaxe in Anspruch nehmen.
Ich spreche davon, nachdem das Virus in das Gehirn eingedrungen ist. Ist das ein Michio Kaku? Unmöglichkeit der Klasse III Wie Perpetuum Mobile, aufgrund von etwas, das mit der Physik der Neuronen zusammenhängt, oder ist es möglich, dass die Lücke geschlossen werden könnte?
Viele Dinge, die einst als unmöglich galten, wie zum Beispiel der Flug zum Mond, wurden später durchgeführt, und ich bin gespannt, wo auf der Skala eine Behandlung gegen Tollwut steht.
Is it universally accepted (or proven via physics) that it will never be possible to survive rabies after symptoms have manifested? Or is it possible that humanity will make it survivable?
byu/MAClaymore inFuturology
29 Kommentare
I have seen some information stating that monoclonal antibodies are a potential way forward.
Well, people have survived it. Not without intervention, though. The Milwaukee Protocol has saved people who only sought help after experiencing symptoms.
[https://www.aaas.org/taxonomy/term/9/surviving-rabies-now-possible](https://www.aaas.org/taxonomy/term/9/surviving-rabies-now-possible)
People have survived it so yeah it’s not a physical law or anything. Medicine just isn’t good enough yet.
It isn’t universally fatal once symptoms present, just very close to it. About 30 people have survived
The body is a machine, and all things that affect it are mechanical. It is always, always, theoretically possible to cure *anything* so long as the body exists.
The question is whether it is too difficult to be practically possible with our current technology, or whether the person who came out of the other side would even be the same person who underwent the process. While in in theory one could, using means we do not have and would not understand, regenerate damaged brain tissue, would that brain tissue be the same person who went in?
But if technology advanced even farther and we found some means to record a person’s exact brain state, then we might be able to „set“ the new brain to match it. (This might actually be impossible as it is largely dependent on where „thoughts“ come from in the brain.)
But in practice, none of that is possible, and we are nowhere even close to figuring out ways to do it.
So it is not on the order of something like a perpetual motion machine. Those are impossible because they are literally, physically, impossible. But brains are definitely possible, because we all have one. And anything that is possible is possible.
What kind of timescale we are looking at to solving those problems, or if human even have the capacity to understand the systems involved, I could not tell you.
As for normal treatments that might help, I have no idea. I am just talking about the theoretical possibility of an extreme. There are probably much simpler ways of curing rabies than the above, even if we do not know what they are yet.
While rabies is nearly 100% fatal, a small number of people have survived, most notably Jeanna Giese, the first to survive without a vaccine using the experimental „Milwaukee Protocol“ (induced coma, drugs) in 2004, leading to about 30+ documented survivors worldwide, many with lasting neurological issues, highlighting the extreme rarity and severe nature of the disease. So, it is possible but not probable. Future developments could make it more probable.
Like others have said, there have been survivors with intervention. As far as I’m aware, there is significant disability associated with them.
I do remember reading and article some time back of blood testing on some indigenous amazonian tribes expressing an abnormally high (25% of the population) antibody count for rabies, so there is some indication that people may be able to naturally fight the virus. It isnt conclusive.
… why would physics be needed for this? Is there a point at which victims try to break the laws of physics?
Symptoms of rabies are a result of severe brain damage. So really the questions is less is rabies cureable and more whether or not severe brain damage can be reversed, because once symptoms set in youre Lready pretty close to being brain dead.
Nanomedicine is in its infancy, but a sufficiently developed medical nanobot system could hunt down rabies virus and repair whatever it broke. Short of that, there’s probably multiple biotech approaches that would work. If you can fix the molecules, the only irreversible damage would be memory loss.
With sufficient knowledge about the virus behavior in living tissue, it might be possible to develop a biochemical agent, probably a kind of a modified antibody, that acts directly in the brain, attaching to the viral particles and making them inactive.
Another option, more challenging, might be to devise a relatively small molecule that interferes with some part of the viral life cycle, probably translation or budding (it is worth noting that the rabies virus really buds out of the host cell, it does not cause its rupture, which might be helpful in treatment). Maybe even some of the already known antivirals would work if modified to be able to move freely around in the brain (the challenge is always to reach enough cells before the damage is too large for meaningful survival).
When taking things more into the science-fiction territory – probably some aliens who are really, really more advanced than us – the „gold standard“ might be to first put the patient into a stasis field where the flow of time is drastically slowed down so the doctors have more time to act, then make an exact copy of the brain to establish a savepoint, and then unleash some highly-precise surgery to literally excise the viral particles out of the brain. no virus – no problem.
My understanding is that genetic variation makes it almost guaranteed that someone survives naturally. For example, some people are immune to HIV. Not many, sure, but if the whole world was infected, it would be enough so that enough people survive to continue. (Immunity prevalence is estimated at 0.3% lower bound, so that would still leave a staggering 24 _million_ people alive.)
I’ve read reports that some remote populations have shown rabies antibodies in their bodies, but it’s not been well studied AFAIK. So I expect (without direct evidence) that _some_ people wouldn’t die, even if we infected everybody somehow. Even at an extremely low percentage, it would probably be enough so that the human race would continue.
We don’t know for sure because obviously conducting such large scale studies that kill the vast majority of the population under study are sometimes questionable.
some people have been cured after symptoms showed, so its not impossible, but those really are the exception instead of the rule. Think you can count how many people made it on the fingers of one hand.
Overall the issue is that when symptoms show, the virus already started affecting the brain. And anything that has to do with an issue in the brain can end up just as damaging as the virus itself.
Once biology is a solved science then it would probably be possible to reverse rabies damage, theoretically it’s not impossible to imagine that once everything about biology is understood, and biochemistry, that you should be able to manipulate the organism into any function or state, or even make it immune/impenetrable to viruses/diseases. This obviously would require an immense amount of knowledge and computing power, but IMO anything biological should have a countermeasure once it is understood
Anything is possible. The problem with rabies is how imbedded and far progressed the disease is by the time symptoms show. And by the time symptoms show, there’s physical damage to neurons already. Sneaky disease. We’ll probably need nano scale machines to repair the damage done
I am so glad I am already vaccinated against this shit, though the vaccine itself is also quite the ordeal, I had tingling in my arms and legs for months.
I think it’s possible but improbable since there are few cases, and deaths, in countries that have the money to develop what would essentially be a cure. There isn’t enough of a capitalist payoff to put the time and money into research. Otoh, maybe AI will come up with something without much effort and maybe what it comes up with won’t be a bother to produce.
Someone I know had the treatment last year and it was $21,000. Insurance paid all of it.
The physical barrier is that some processes are totally destructive. If Rabbies physically already destroyed information we can’t recover it.
But, is this really the case with rabbies? We don’t know. Maybe the same information is stored somewhere else, and we could retrieve it with better technology. Maybe we could guess the information by looking around the destroyed information. Maybe together it’s theoretically enough to reconstruct it.
But we are obviously far away from this. But purely theoretically there might be a way.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/312245-rodney-versus-death
Good story about the how the disease works, the Milwaukee Protocol (and debates about whether it works), and the research that suggests that human populations in areas with a lot of rabies carriers may have the ability to develop antibodies in time to prevent death.
That is a very relevant question and I hope we can do something about rabies someday.
I live close to the US border and we’ve seen renewed incursions of wild animals with rabies, crossing from areas in the US where the animal vaccination program has been a little erratic in recent years. We’ve had outbreaks of raccoon rabies this year near Cowansville and Farnham. Nobody died… yet.
When you write „after symptoms have manifested“, you pretty much underscore the medical challenge. Once rabies crosses into the brain, it destroys everything like a wildfire. You have very little time to act, and every hour that passes sees massive damage that cannot be reversed.
The very few people who survived rabies had terrible brain damage.
Let’s say we can somehow inject a potent antiviral directly inside the brain. Say, in the cerebrospinal fluid. We have a better understanding now of how this fluid penetrates and exits brain tissue through the glymphatic system and its filters. The antiviral needs to be small enough circulate with the cerebrospinal fluid and reach deep inside brain tissues.
Such an antiviral agent doesn’t exist. It can’t be a natural or synthetic antibody, this wouldn’t work inside the CSF. It would have to be a molecule that acts directly on the virus by preventing it from infecting cells. Or it would have to selectively kill or disable infected cells.
This agent would have to be tiny, not bigger than an average protein.
One possibility is to saturate the CSF with tiny vacuoles or fragments (decoys) that are covered with the binding protein that the virus is attaching to. Most of the viruses would miss the true brain cells and would become duds, attaching to the decoys. This would considerably slow down the progress, giving time for the vaccine to elicit an immune response in the body.
But.. the immune response cannot reach inside the brain so we’d need another mechanism to finish the job.
I’ve seen a lot of gore on the internet, but some of the most haunting videos I’ve seen are people with rabies trying to drink water.
One was an older guy. Looked like a hardened soldier type guy. Couldn’t even force the cup to his lips his body was fighting against him so severely. Violently shaking and trembling. It’s like you could see his bones willing the cup to his mouth, but every muscle tendon fighting against him.
Few things as horrifying was witnessing your very own body fight adamantly against your mind
It’s extraordinary rare, but several people have been documented to have survived rabies
The challenge is how to kill the virus in the brain without collaterally damaging the brain tissue. It is possible, in theory, to create some kind of agent (either capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier or that you can inject directly into the brain) that only destroys the virus, without affecting the brain, and that can either replicate on its own or be injected in a large enough amount to ensure all viral copies are neutralized. The issue is what would that agent be. Maybe a protein that blocks the proteins of the virus‘ membranes? A restriction enzyme that slices the virus‘ genome (the rabies virus has quite a small genome)?
The problem with rabies is that the symptoms result from it destroying your brain via acute encephalitis and excitotoxicity so once you have symptoms you have already started to experience brain damage. As a result of this, even if we were to develop a post-symptomatic cure for rabies you are still going to have irreparable brain damage.
This means that sure, we could possibly one day come up for a cure that treats rabies once symptoms have shown up but it would be a moot point unless we also come up with a way to fix the damage that occurs when rabies begins to multiply uncontrollably within the brain as well as the central nervous system. Until we get to that point then the prophylactic vaccine is going to be the best treatment for rabies.
I feel like the way we handle rabies works fine right now considering cases are so few and far between. I had rabies myself. Cost me $7k to get all those shots and they all hurt a lot.
Rabies hides in the central nervous system and infects all of that before it invades the brain and it’s when the brain is infected symptoms show. So when the symptoms show up it’s already a late stage disease and you’re at the very least dealing with long term damage even if you’re cured.
It’s also really good at hiding from the body’s own immune system. And when it’s in the brain, there’s a barrier that prevents blood from entering the brain which also makes it really difficult to administer any medicines to the brain itself.
There’s research being done on delivery systems for medicines/antibodies in to the brain, so it’s far from impossible that we could see the working medicines in the future. But from what I can figure out that’s just life saving and we shouldn’t expect full symptom recovery.
If AI is so fucking smart. (We are investing Trillions!) Then prove that it can cure a simple dissea like rabies or diabetes, or even cancer.
Nope AI is just Snakeoil 2030!
Biology isn’t physics. Anything that’s physically possible will be eventually possible in biology. „Never“ is a very long time!
I would suspect that it will eradicated in the future, but likely with pre-exposure vaccine.
Current treatments work if administered early enough after exposure.
I’m thinking that a prophylactic vaccine has not been developed because of the economics of developing it. And the very limited. Inner of cases.