Rabies

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Central nervous system

Rabies

Rabies is a frequently fatal, acute viral infection. You can get rabies when an infected animal (often raccoons, dogs, or bats) bites you or when the infected animal's saliva touches a scrape or cut on your skin. Rabies may also be spread from person to person through organ transplantation.

Rabies is spread by infected saliva that enters the body through a bite or broken skin. The virus travels from the wound to the brain, where it causes swelling, called inflammation. This inflammation results in the symptoms of the disease.

The actual time between infection and when you get sick (called the "incubation period") ranges from 10 days to 7 years. The average incubation period is 3 to 7 weeks.

In the past, human cases in the U.S. usually resulted from a dog bite, but recently, more cases of human rabies have been linked to raccoons or bats. Although dog bites are a common cause of rabies in developing countries, there have been no reports of rabies caused by dog bites in the U.S. for a number of years due to widespread animal vaccination.

Besides dogs, bats, skunks, raccoons, foxes, and other wild animals can also be sources of the rabies virus. There are an estimated 55,000 deaths from rabies worldwide each year. Most deaths occur in children.

The United Kingdom had once completely eradicated rabies. This is no longer true. Recently, rabies-infected bats have been found in Scotland.

Review Date: 01/06/2006
Reviewed By: Monica Gandhi MD, MPH, Assistant Professor, Division of Infectious Diseases, UCSF, San Francisco, CA. Review provided by VeriMed Healthcare Network.