October 31, 2024 • 28 mins
Why has rabies invaded our nightmares for centuries? Author and veterinarian Monica Murphy tells us about the cultural history of rabies (which involves vampires and werewolves!) and how our long nightmare with the disease came to an end. Then, wildlife biologist Kathy Nelson tells us about a surprising program that works to control raccoon rabies… from the sky. Enjoy this episode from Incubation, another Pushkin podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, it's Jacob. If you want more podcasts about
creative people solving high stakes technical problems, I've got good
news for you. A new season of a show called
Incubation is out now. Incubation is a show about viruses.
(00:36):
I'm the host of the show, and the people I
interviewed for this season have been full of insight and delight,
and I have learned a ton. So basically, I think
if you like What's Your Problem, you will like Incubation.
Here is the first episode of the new season of
the show, and if you do like it, you can
listen to more episodes wherever you're listening to this. Here's
(00:59):
the story about rabies. In three sentences, you get bitten
by a rabbit animal, you'll lose control of your mind,
and then you die. So it is not surprising that
Raby's terrified humanity for thousands of years. Why do you
write a book about Raby's, gosh?
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I have always thought Rabi's was so interesting in terms
of its biology, the way it hijacks the brain to
ensure that it'll continue its own spread, the way it
affects the relationship between people and animals, which since I'm
a veterinarian is pretty central to my life.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and the co author with
Bill Wasick of Rabbit, a cultural History of the world's
most diabolical virus. I should mention that Monica also happens
to be my neighbor and a friend of mine.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I think the stories that my rabbit Google alert turns
up every week. You know, bobcats like coming into a bar,
and like assaulting someone at a pool table, or raccoons
attacking people's trucks. All that stuff is just really interesting
and scary and the stuff of nightmares. But I love
(02:11):
that science has an answer for all of that.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
In the developed world, almost nobody gets rabies anymore. In
the United States, it's fewer than ten people a year.
Even our dogs are safe from the disease for the
most part. And the reason for this, the reason we
don't have to worry that every barking dog we see
might bite us and kill us, goes back to one
of the most important scientists in the history of both
(02:35):
viruses and vaccines, Louis Pasteur. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this
is Incubation, a show about viruses. We're delighted to be
launching season two today. We have lots more viruses to
talk about this season, and we're starting with rabies. In
the first half of the show, we'll be talking to
Monica about rabies and the work of Louis Pasteur. In
(02:56):
the second half of the show, we'll talk to a
scientist who's fighting rabies in wildlife in a really surprising way.
Talk about rabies. What is rabies?
Speaker 2 (03:11):
So, Rabies is an RNA virus. It is special because
it is transmitted through bites, primarily unlike the sort of
transmission pattern we see with other viruses. In rabies, at
the site of the bite, the virus is looking to
interact with a nerve, and once it has engaged the nerve,
(03:36):
it kind of ratchets its way up the central nervous
system from the bite site through peripheral nerves up into
the spine, and from the spine up into the brain.
It takes a while. It's a slow, slow process.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
It's like a centimeter a day.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
There is a real sort of relationship between how far
away the bite is from the brain and how long
it takes to develop rabies, although it's not strict, and
it does mean that if you're bitten on the face,
you are likely to come down with rabies faster than
if you're bitten on the toe, and not every bite
(04:13):
from a rabbit animal will result in transmission something like
twenty percent your round number. And once the virus does
make it into the brain, you're going to develop symptoms
of rabies. They're horrible, and then you're going to die.
It's practically speaking one hundred percent fatal, like really rotten.
(04:35):
And the way it works too, which is pretty horrifying
if you think about it, is it's hijacking the brain
to ensure that it's going to be spread to another individual.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
And you say, what do you mean, So in especially
in the.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Species it's adapted to, let's say dog rabies. In the dog,
it is going to stimulate parts of the brain that
kind of rev up that dog's sort of social emotional state,
make it much more prone to violence and biting incidents
with other dogs. So that meanwhile it's being creeded in
(05:09):
the saliva. It's really increasing the likelihood that it's going
to make it into another dog and continuous life cycle,
which is.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Kind of amazing, right, Like it's just a virus, yeah,
And it's essentially evolved to like change the behavior of
this complex mammal to make it bite other mammals so
that the virus will spread. Like that is a wild
feet of evolution.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah, yeah, it's really really scary. In places where humans
are frequently in contact with rabbit animals, the sort of
behavioral changes that occur in the human Rebee's victim are
also really messy. You know, human with Raebe's might not
actively try to bite you, unless they're a little kid.
(05:53):
They might punch you in the nose or just scream
curses at you.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
In general, people become more hostile.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
More violent, yeah, or sexed up.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Uh huh so just like more id Yeah, terrifying. You're
being attacked by your own rain right, somehow, You're like
your own thoughts are attacking you. Yeah, yeah, I mean
so you talk with respect to that in the book
about kind of rabies and mythology, right, rabies and were wolves,
(06:24):
rabies and vampires, like, tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
There's at least a deep resonance between these stories of
a sort of contagious you know, contagious zombieism or werewolf
ism or vampirism where the bite the bite. Yeah, and
there's the association with bats of vampires and.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Both and both bats and wolves are historical vectors of rabies,
just to be clear. So this is kind of rabies.
It's this ancient disease. It is terrifying where crazed animals
bite people and turn people into crazed animals who then die.
Basically the state of play rabies forever. And then onto
(07:09):
the stage of history walks our hero, Louis Pasteur. That's right,
tell me about Pasteur.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Most folks know at least a little bit about Louis
Pastor because he had a long scientific career. He was
trained as a physicist and chemist, and he grew into
more of a microbiological concentration in his work. Along the way,
he established germ theory.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yes, that people thought was like a crazy idea. And
this is like a mid to late eighteen hundreds, right,
and the world already had the smallpox vaccine at this point.
But I do feel like it's worth remembering here that
that was sort of this lucky break, right, where like
there just happened to be this mild disease, cowpox, that
made people immune to this terrible disease to smallpox, and Pasteur,
(08:00):
as you write in the book. He decides that he's
going to apply this germ theory to vaccines, right, He's
actually going to use science to create a vaccin So
tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
What Louis Prester sought to do and succeeded in doing
for the first time ever is manipulating microbes to sort
of move them away from their wild state into an
attenuated week in state and induce immunity using.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Those right, So okay, so pasteur. He develops a few
animal vaccines in this way, and then he decides that
the first human vaccine he's going to make is going
to be a rabies vaccine, you know, a vaccine for
this terrifying disease. So what does he actually have to do?
Speaker 2 (08:46):
So, because there's no way to grow rabies inside of
a test tube, he had to maintain a population of
rabbit animals in his lab.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Terrifying.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Yeah awful, I mean really gruesome and scary for the
people he worked with. They would harvest the saliva and
introduce it into more dogs or into rabbits.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
How do you harvest the salon from a rabid dog
really carefully? Yeah? Right, I walked into that.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
But yeah, involving like a high pet.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Oh my god, in the mouth of a rabbit dog. Yeah, yeah,
I'm gonna die. Yeah, I'm afraid. So so you've got
step one, find the nasty disease. Step two, seemingly the
harder part, turn that nasty disease into a thing that
will induce some unity without causing disease.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Right, they can't see the microbe, they know it's in
the nervous tissue. So they start dissecting out nervous tissue
from animals with rabies, specifically rabbits, and they aged it.
They aged the tissue in a sort of desiccating tray
and determined that with sufficient aging it weakens it.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Just leave it sitting on the shelf for a while.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah, Except they ultimately arrived at a method that was
a lot more complex. They had a sort of well
whole sort of assembly line of tissues at various stages
of aging. So you know, you've got your your rabbit
spinal quarter over here that's aged fourteen days, and here's
a thirteen day one, and okay, et cetera. The ones
(10:19):
that are oldest are least virulent. The ones that are
newest are most virulent and too dangerous to put right
into a person right out of the gate. So they
start with an injection of the longest aged nervous tissue,
the weakest, the weakest one, and then over they think
of his ten days the initial protocol, they inject thirteen
(10:40):
injections with progressively stronger that is, newer tissue.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
And so is the basic idea, like the weakest one
induces some immune response, so that you can then tolerate
a slightly stronger one, and you're kind of going up
a staircase of immunity.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
That's how he developed it. And of course today we
just have a single strength Maybe's vaccine in use. So
his method wasn't the only way to induce immunity, but
it's you know, they were dealing with a one hundred
percent fatal disease, is I think understandably nervous about introducing
it into people, and they realized both that they can
they can do pre exposure vaccination so that the dog
(11:18):
can't get infected with Rabi's.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Uh huh, hold that thought, that's.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Not put into use right away, But then they also
can start a series of vaccine after the dog has
been exposed to Raby's and prevent him from coming down
with the disease.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
So they figure this out, and then we have this
moment when it's time to try it on a person
for the first time. What is that moment?
Speaker 2 (11:44):
So a case was brought to Louis Pester's attention that
seemed sufficiently concerning to take a chance on this vaccine
and involved a young boy who was bitten by the
grocer's dog who had had undergone a suspicious behavior change
and was marauding the neighborhood. The bites were extensive, and
(12:08):
so that's another potential risk factor for development.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Of Rabi's we talked about, meaning he got bit.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Lots of places, you know, lots of places really deeply,
so lots of places where the virus could have encountered
a nerve, making it likely that he was going to
come down with rabies at some point. They were very
pessimistic about the boy's chances, and so they sent him
to Paris to.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Louis Pestor's lab, where he had this vaccine that he
had not yet tested on a human being.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Yeah, he had been thinking about testing it on himself.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Uh huh, a kind of tradition in science.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Yes, But before he had a chance to test on himself.
He was persuaded by the physicians caring for this boy
that this kid might very likely to die if he
doesn't get the vaccine, and so Pastor went ahead with
his process.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
So the boy gets this experimental vaccine, and now Pastor
has to just wait right wait to see what happened.
So what's going on with Pastor while he's waiting to
see whether the boy survives?
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Well, Pastor was sleepless. He was just in a state
of agonized waiting and was having health problems related to that.
He traveled a little bit for his health. Well, he
sort of ticked down the days.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
What happens with the boy?
Speaker 2 (13:25):
The boy does great. He remains healthy during the ten
day process where he could see innoculations, and once a
few months had passed, at the point at which you know,
it was believed he would have come down with rabies
by now, if not because of the because the bytes,
perhaps because the vaccine was dangerous, he continued to thrive.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Okay, so the vaccine works, what like, how does it play?
Speaker 2 (13:49):
People were excited around the world. I mean, the vanquishing
of rabies was big news. Just as Pistar had calculated,
not immediately embraced by everyone. There were physicians everywhere who
had been following the science and sort of got it
and were eager to put it to use.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
And in those sort of long run in the you know,
one hundred year arc What what does pastors work mean
both for rabies and for you know, disease research and
treatment more generally, His lab.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Is often credited with developing the science of immunology and
furthermore lead the foundations just with the basic idea that, like,
you can take infectious agents and you can figure out
a way to make them weaker. That is the basis
on which all modern vaccine science works.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
So let's talk about rabies today. What is the status
of rabies today?
Speaker 2 (14:49):
So rabies is still a problem in many parts of
the world who have not yet eliminated dog rabies. But
we're really lucky here that the use of the pre
exposure vaccine and dogs eliminated dog rabies. We no longer
have to like look askance at our pet dog and
worry that contact with them could kill us. The parts
(15:14):
of the world where that is not true, where dog
rabies is still endemic, places like India and parts of Africa,
there are still a lot of human rabies deaths. I
think the who uses the number sixty thousand rabies deaths
are still happening every year around the world. That numbers
is really contested. It's been a real challenge getting the
(15:37):
vaccines and the other products that fight rabies to the
people who need them most. But those products are prohibitively expensive.
So raebies is considered a neglected disease by the international
health authorities. But people are still dying of rabies. And
then in parts of the world like Europe and the
United States where dog rabies is not the issue, we
(16:00):
do still have wildlife rabies.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
So like in the US, what wild animals have rabies?
Speaker 2 (16:05):
There's rabies adapted to fox, skunks, raccoons, and a whole
lot of bats in the United States.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Right, I read that, like, if you wake up and
there's a bat in your room, you should probably get
a rabies shot because bats can bite you and you
don't even know us.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yes, there's an argument for getting raby's vaccine if you
wake up in a room with a bat, although you
know you should consult your local.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Health Stuard writing the book change the way you think
about the relationship between humans and animals.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
I do think that there is a way in which
our relationship with dogs and cats especially, you know, the
sort of pure sweetness of it that a lot of
us experience now, like it was it had a darker
side in the pre vaccine era.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Your dog could turn into a monster and kill you
or your child. Yes, that was like a real thing
that could definitely happen.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
It was a real thing, and that was that made
it really hard to like love and baby our dogs
in quite the same way as we do today.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
So like this modern phenomenon of the dog being, to
what is arguably a weird extent, a part of the family,
and I include my own family as you know, in
that that like, you couldn't really have that without pasteur,
without the rabies vaccine.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
It certainly doesn't reach its sort of completion without that.
I mean, it's wonderful for those of us who love dogs.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Thank you, Monica, That was delightful.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah. Thanks.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Monica Murphy is the co author with Bill Wassick of Rabbit,
a cultural history of the world's most diabolical virus. Their
most recent book is Our Kindred Creatures. How Americans came
to feel the way they do about animals. We'll be
back in a minute to talk about the surprising way
that wildlife biologists are fighting rabies in America right now.
(18:08):
By the early part of the twenty first century, the
rabies vaccine had almost entirely eliminated rabies from people and
dogs in the United States, but the disease has persisted
in wild animals. I talked about this with Kathy Nelson
years ago.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
When I was in Vermont. We used to operate a
rabies hotline in the state. It would get calls in
from the public and we would sometimes go out to
investigate them, and we had a skunk that was trying
to bite the gas cap off of a lawnmower. And
they'll just bite anything that's in sight, because that's one
of the fascinating parts about the virus is that it's
(18:46):
designed to tell the brain to bite things.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Kathy is the wildlife biologist and the operations supervisor for
the National Rabies Management Program with the US Department of Agriculture.
For the past twenty six years, she's been part of
a federal program that has been fighting rabies in a
way that I have to say I found delightful. So
tell me about the first time you went up in
(19:09):
the air to fling rabies vaccines at the ground.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
Yeah, I still remember it was so exciting. You you know,
you help load all these baits onto a plane. You
walk up the little steps of the small plane, you
get in it, someone closes the hatch on you. You know,
the engines start, you take off. You're flying over beautiful
terrain and landscape, just beautiful agricultural forested land. And you know,
(19:36):
the person up front says, okay, machine on and you know,
baits are going down this little belt and I'm just
moving them around, looking out the window, seeing moose, deer,
you know, all kinds of wildlife. I couldn't literally could
not believe that I was getting paid to do a
job like this.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
What kind of planes were you going up?
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Then?
Speaker 3 (19:54):
They have a single wing, two engines.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
How many seats? Like, how small is it?
Speaker 3 (19:58):
If there were seats in them, there probably would be
it would probably be about a dozen seats.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
You're basically flying at a cargo van. Yeah, so these
baits are falling from this. Maybe this is a dumb question,
but like, is there ever any word they're going to
hit somebody on the head.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
Yeah, No, not a dumb question at all. Yeah, So
the navigator in the front seat, not the pilot, but
the other person who is a USDA wild Life Services employee.
They have an on off switch. So anytime we're approaching
a house or a road or a major body of water,
that switch goes off so that baits aren't distributed. You know,
over the course of a twenty five year program, we've
(20:37):
hit a roof for two. But fortunately, you know, once
folks learn about our program, they're generally really really accepting
of it, and you know, they're not too mad.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Is it happening like literally today? Is it happening this?
You know, we're talking in August of twenty twenty four.
Is there a plane in the air today?
Speaker 3 (20:57):
There is? Literally I got a text this morning saying
all five aircraft are taxing for run ups and take
off in Watertown. That's Watertown, New York.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Tell me about the baits, Like, what's one of look like?
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Tastes like, so we use different vaccine types. One of
them looks like kind of like a little ketchup packet
with a slight oil on the outside and attached to
that oil or tiny little fishmeal crumbs.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Fishmeal sounds delicious to a raccoon, I'm sure.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Yeah, Okay, So the other company they make a sweet
bait and it's a sugary, sweet like marshmallow kind of
sweet vanilla based bait.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Presumably you can't just like fling these things out of
an airplane over a city, right, So how do you
how do you do it? In you know, urban areas.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
Primarily we drive around in trucks. You know, someone's driving,
another person has the window down in the passenger seat.
They're tossing a couple of baits down. We record the
location of all of these baits with a GPS unit
so that we know where we've baited. Our biggest struggle
right now is because there's so many other food sources,
(22:04):
you know, trying to pull them away from a dumpster
full of pizza to eat eat one of our beats
is a real challenge.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
I have literally, say, a raccoon in Prospect Park in
Brooklyn eating a hole slice of.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
It's h yeah. They I mean, they're omnivores, so they're
gonna eat anything you know around. But we have done
a ton of research in urban areas looking at movement patterns,
home range sizes, because you have to get them right
in the right spot for them to even find them.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
So let's talk about the scope of the project now,
like what is the range of where you where you
do this.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
We have a band of vaccine distribution zone that goes
from Maine kind of across the Canada border down to
Ohio and then pretty much straight down from Ohio to Alabama.
And that's designed to stop the westward spread of raccoon
rabies and the northward spread into Canada.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Oh. Interesting, it's like a like a line of defense.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Yep, exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Was that the notion when you started was the issue, like, oh,
rabies is spreading, let's defend against the spread of rabies.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Yes. So the story of raccoon rabies is a really
interesting one. Raccoon rabies was first sort of documented in
the late nineteen forties in Florida. But then there were
some raccoon hunters from West Virginia, Virginia area who wanted
to replenish their raccoon supply. They went down It was
real commonplace back then to move raccoons around for raccoon hunting,
(23:33):
so they went down south, got some raccoons, released them
into an area on the Virginia West Virginia line and
inevitably released some rabid raccoons without knowing it, and then
raccoon rabies exploded from there. It reached most Northeastern states
by the early nineties.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
And is there risk of raccoons passing rabies to humans? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Absolutely. Over the years, there have been humans that have
contracted raccoon rabies. Certainly, human health and safety is always paramount.
Also animal health and safety. You know, every year there's
there's about three hundred cats in the US that die
from rabi's. There's about fifty dogs that die from rabi's.
It's a cost benefit sort of program where what it
(24:22):
costs us to manage our program is significantly less than
what it costs the American public to live with rabies
every year, just in terms of healthcare costs, you know,
public education, post exposure, prophylaxis, all of that adds up
really fast.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
So the program started in the nineties to stop the
spread of raccoon raybis. Has it worked? Did it stop
the spread of raccoon raybis?
Speaker 3 (24:48):
It did. After we distribute baits, about a month after,
we go back into an area and we use live
traps to catch raccoons. We take a blood sample from them,
pull a tooth, weigh them, sects them, take some general
notes on you know, their condition, and that blood sample
get sent off to the lab and that tells us
ultimately whether or not they have antibodies. Again, and the
(25:10):
tooth gives us their age and also tells us whether
or not they ate the bait because the bait has
a biomarker that stains their tooth. So that whole process,
that's our monitoring program, along with all the surveillance we
do where we do pick up dead raccoons off the
road and test them for rabies. The Centers for Disease
Control CDC has documented a seventy seven percent decline in
(25:34):
raccoons with raccoon variants since our program began in nineteen
ninety seven, so we know it's working. We've made significant
progress in being able to move that zone to the
east toward the ocean, which is what you know, our
ultimate goal is that bait zone of containment, and then
just keep marching it toward the ocean till, you know,
(25:54):
till you've eliminated the variant.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Right when you get to the sea, you're done. You're
like marching to the sea.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Yep, you're done.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
So, so you've been doing this a long time. You
are a wildlife biologist by training. I'm curious if your
career has changed the way you feel about wildlife, about
the relationship between humans and wildlife.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Yeah. I mean I love all wildlife, you know. When
I was in college getting my degree, you know, like
any wildlife professional, I think you dream of, you know,
working with polar bears or mountain lions or you know
some some big charismatic megafauna and you know, and I
landed on raccoons, but I wouldn't change it for anything.
(26:36):
They're so smart. They have not made a trash can
yet that they can't get into, or they're just you know,
if you have ever seen one up close or I
you know, I would encourage any listeners if they have
the opportunity and they see one dead on the road.
It sounds crazy, but just stop and look at it.
(26:57):
They're fascinating animals. They have little hands, just like we do.
They have an opposable thumb. Genetically, they're closer in origin
to bears than they are to like cat and dogs
and those kind of things. So they're just really smart animals.
They think about what they're doing. We have a National
Wildlife Research Center, and they did a side study where
(27:20):
they would put a marshmallow in the tub of water
and the raccoons would learn that all they had to
do was keep putting more rocks in the water till
that marshmallow rose to the top and they could reach
in and eat it. So that's just one example of
how smart they are and how if they're given enough time,
they'll figure something out.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Thank you so much for your time. It was great
to speak with you.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Yeah, you too, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Kathy Nelson is a wildlife biologist with the US Department
of Agriculture. Thanks to both my guests today, Kathy Nelson
and Monica Murphy. Next week on Incubation, I met on
my mind that I have to go do it, but
at the same time I was going to deal with
the beasts, which means I may not come back home alive.
(28:06):
Incubation is a co production of Pushkin Industries and Studio
at iHeartMedia. It's produced by Kate Furby and Brittany Cronin.
The show is edited by Lacey Roberts. It's mastered by
Sarah Bruguier, fact checking by Joseph Friedman. Our Executive producers
are Lacey Roberts and Matt Romano. I'm Jacob Goldstein. Thanks
for listening.
Pushkin. Hey, it's Jacob. If you want more podcasts about
creative people solving high stakes technical problems, I've got good
news for you. A new season of a show called
Incubation is out now. Incubation is a show about viruses.
(00:36):
I'm the host of the show, and the people I
interviewed for this season have been full of insight and delight,
and I have learned a ton. So basically, I think
if you like What's Your Problem, you will like Incubation.
Here is the first episode of the new season of
the show, and if you do like it, you can
listen to more episodes wherever you're listening to this. Here's
(00:59):
the story about rabies. In three sentences, you get bitten
by a rabbit animal, you'll lose control of your mind,
and then you die. So it is not surprising that
Raby's terrified humanity for thousands of years. Why do you
write a book about Raby's, gosh?
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I have always thought Rabi's was so interesting in terms
of its biology, the way it hijacks the brain to
ensure that it'll continue its own spread, the way it
affects the relationship between people and animals, which since I'm
a veterinarian is pretty central to my life.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and the co author with
Bill Wasick of Rabbit, a cultural History of the world's
most diabolical virus. I should mention that Monica also happens
to be my neighbor and a friend of mine.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I think the stories that my rabbit Google alert turns
up every week. You know, bobcats like coming into a bar,
and like assaulting someone at a pool table, or raccoons
attacking people's trucks. All that stuff is just really interesting
and scary and the stuff of nightmares. But I love
(02:11):
that science has an answer for all of that.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
In the developed world, almost nobody gets rabies anymore. In
the United States, it's fewer than ten people a year.
Even our dogs are safe from the disease for the
most part. And the reason for this, the reason we
don't have to worry that every barking dog we see
might bite us and kill us, goes back to one
of the most important scientists in the history of both
(02:35):
viruses and vaccines, Louis Pasteur. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this
is Incubation, a show about viruses. We're delighted to be
launching season two today. We have lots more viruses to
talk about this season, and we're starting with rabies. In
the first half of the show, we'll be talking to
Monica about rabies and the work of Louis Pasteur. In
(02:56):
the second half of the show, we'll talk to a
scientist who's fighting rabies in wildlife in a really surprising way.
Talk about rabies. What is rabies?
Speaker 2 (03:11):
So, Rabies is an RNA virus. It is special because
it is transmitted through bites, primarily unlike the sort of
transmission pattern we see with other viruses. In rabies, at
the site of the bite, the virus is looking to
interact with a nerve, and once it has engaged the nerve,
(03:36):
it kind of ratchets its way up the central nervous
system from the bite site through peripheral nerves up into
the spine, and from the spine up into the brain.
It takes a while. It's a slow, slow process.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
It's like a centimeter a day.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
There is a real sort of relationship between how far
away the bite is from the brain and how long
it takes to develop rabies, although it's not strict, and
it does mean that if you're bitten on the face,
you are likely to come down with rabies faster than
if you're bitten on the toe, and not every bite
(04:13):
from a rabbit animal will result in transmission something like
twenty percent your round number. And once the virus does
make it into the brain, you're going to develop symptoms
of rabies. They're horrible, and then you're going to die.
It's practically speaking one hundred percent fatal, like really rotten.
(04:35):
And the way it works too, which is pretty horrifying
if you think about it, is it's hijacking the brain
to ensure that it's going to be spread to another individual.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
And you say, what do you mean, So in especially
in the.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Species it's adapted to, let's say dog rabies. In the dog,
it is going to stimulate parts of the brain that
kind of rev up that dog's sort of social emotional state,
make it much more prone to violence and biting incidents
with other dogs. So that meanwhile it's being creeded in
(05:09):
the saliva. It's really increasing the likelihood that it's going
to make it into another dog and continuous life cycle,
which is.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Kind of amazing, right, Like it's just a virus, yeah,
And it's essentially evolved to like change the behavior of
this complex mammal to make it bite other mammals so
that the virus will spread. Like that is a wild
feet of evolution.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah, yeah, it's really really scary. In places where humans
are frequently in contact with rabbit animals, the sort of
behavioral changes that occur in the human Rebee's victim are
also really messy. You know, human with Raebe's might not
actively try to bite you, unless they're a little kid.
(05:53):
They might punch you in the nose or just scream
curses at you.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
In general, people become more hostile.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
More violent, yeah, or sexed up.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Uh huh so just like more id Yeah, terrifying. You're
being attacked by your own rain right, somehow, You're like
your own thoughts are attacking you. Yeah, yeah, I mean
so you talk with respect to that in the book
about kind of rabies and mythology, right, rabies and were wolves,
(06:24):
rabies and vampires, like, tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
There's at least a deep resonance between these stories of
a sort of contagious you know, contagious zombieism or werewolf
ism or vampirism where the bite the bite. Yeah, and
there's the association with bats of vampires and.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Both and both bats and wolves are historical vectors of rabies,
just to be clear. So this is kind of rabies.
It's this ancient disease. It is terrifying where crazed animals
bite people and turn people into crazed animals who then die.
Basically the state of play rabies forever. And then onto
(07:09):
the stage of history walks our hero, Louis Pasteur. That's right,
tell me about Pasteur.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Most folks know at least a little bit about Louis
Pastor because he had a long scientific career. He was
trained as a physicist and chemist, and he grew into
more of a microbiological concentration in his work. Along the way,
he established germ theory.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yes, that people thought was like a crazy idea. And
this is like a mid to late eighteen hundreds, right,
and the world already had the smallpox vaccine at this point.
But I do feel like it's worth remembering here that
that was sort of this lucky break, right, where like
there just happened to be this mild disease, cowpox, that
made people immune to this terrible disease to smallpox, and Pasteur,
(08:00):
as you write in the book. He decides that he's
going to apply this germ theory to vaccines, right, He's
actually going to use science to create a vaccin So
tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
What Louis Prester sought to do and succeeded in doing
for the first time ever is manipulating microbes to sort
of move them away from their wild state into an
attenuated week in state and induce immunity using.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Those right, So okay, so pasteur. He develops a few
animal vaccines in this way, and then he decides that
the first human vaccine he's going to make is going
to be a rabies vaccine, you know, a vaccine for
this terrifying disease. So what does he actually have to do?
Speaker 2 (08:46):
So, because there's no way to grow rabies inside of
a test tube, he had to maintain a population of
rabbit animals in his lab.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Terrifying.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Yeah awful, I mean really gruesome and scary for the
people he worked with. They would harvest the saliva and
introduce it into more dogs or into rabbits.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
How do you harvest the salon from a rabid dog
really carefully? Yeah? Right, I walked into that.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
But yeah, involving like a high pet.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Oh my god, in the mouth of a rabbit dog. Yeah, yeah,
I'm gonna die. Yeah, I'm afraid. So so you've got
step one, find the nasty disease. Step two, seemingly the
harder part, turn that nasty disease into a thing that
will induce some unity without causing disease.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Right, they can't see the microbe, they know it's in
the nervous tissue. So they start dissecting out nervous tissue
from animals with rabies, specifically rabbits, and they aged it.
They aged the tissue in a sort of desiccating tray
and determined that with sufficient aging it weakens it.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Just leave it sitting on the shelf for a while.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah, Except they ultimately arrived at a method that was
a lot more complex. They had a sort of well
whole sort of assembly line of tissues at various stages
of aging. So you know, you've got your your rabbit
spinal quarter over here that's aged fourteen days, and here's
a thirteen day one, and okay, et cetera. The ones
(10:19):
that are oldest are least virulent. The ones that are
newest are most virulent and too dangerous to put right
into a person right out of the gate. So they
start with an injection of the longest aged nervous tissue,
the weakest, the weakest one, and then over they think
of his ten days the initial protocol, they inject thirteen
(10:40):
injections with progressively stronger that is, newer tissue.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
And so is the basic idea, like the weakest one
induces some immune response, so that you can then tolerate
a slightly stronger one, and you're kind of going up
a staircase of immunity.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
That's how he developed it. And of course today we
just have a single strength Maybe's vaccine in use. So
his method wasn't the only way to induce immunity, but
it's you know, they were dealing with a one hundred
percent fatal disease, is I think understandably nervous about introducing
it into people, and they realized both that they can
they can do pre exposure vaccination so that the dog
(11:18):
can't get infected with Rabi's.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Uh huh, hold that thought, that's.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Not put into use right away, But then they also
can start a series of vaccine after the dog has
been exposed to Raby's and prevent him from coming down
with the disease.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
So they figure this out, and then we have this
moment when it's time to try it on a person
for the first time. What is that moment?
Speaker 2 (11:44):
So a case was brought to Louis Pester's attention that
seemed sufficiently concerning to take a chance on this vaccine
and involved a young boy who was bitten by the
grocer's dog who had had undergone a suspicious behavior change
and was marauding the neighborhood. The bites were extensive, and
(12:08):
so that's another potential risk factor for development.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Of Rabi's we talked about, meaning he got bit.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Lots of places, you know, lots of places really deeply,
so lots of places where the virus could have encountered
a nerve, making it likely that he was going to
come down with rabies at some point. They were very
pessimistic about the boy's chances, and so they sent him
to Paris to.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Louis Pestor's lab, where he had this vaccine that he
had not yet tested on a human being.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Yeah, he had been thinking about testing it on himself.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Uh huh, a kind of tradition in science.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Yes, But before he had a chance to test on himself.
He was persuaded by the physicians caring for this boy
that this kid might very likely to die if he
doesn't get the vaccine, and so Pastor went ahead with
his process.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
So the boy gets this experimental vaccine, and now Pastor
has to just wait right wait to see what happened.
So what's going on with Pastor while he's waiting to
see whether the boy survives?
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Well, Pastor was sleepless. He was just in a state
of agonized waiting and was having health problems related to that.
He traveled a little bit for his health. Well, he
sort of ticked down the days.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
What happens with the boy?
Speaker 2 (13:25):
The boy does great. He remains healthy during the ten
day process where he could see innoculations, and once a
few months had passed, at the point at which you know,
it was believed he would have come down with rabies
by now, if not because of the because the bytes,
perhaps because the vaccine was dangerous, he continued to thrive.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Okay, so the vaccine works, what like, how does it play?
Speaker 2 (13:49):
People were excited around the world. I mean, the vanquishing
of rabies was big news. Just as Pistar had calculated,
not immediately embraced by everyone. There were physicians everywhere who
had been following the science and sort of got it
and were eager to put it to use.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
And in those sort of long run in the you know,
one hundred year arc What what does pastors work mean
both for rabies and for you know, disease research and
treatment more generally, His lab.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Is often credited with developing the science of immunology and
furthermore lead the foundations just with the basic idea that, like,
you can take infectious agents and you can figure out
a way to make them weaker. That is the basis
on which all modern vaccine science works.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
So let's talk about rabies today. What is the status
of rabies today?
Speaker 2 (14:49):
So rabies is still a problem in many parts of
the world who have not yet eliminated dog rabies. But
we're really lucky here that the use of the pre
exposure vaccine and dogs eliminated dog rabies. We no longer
have to like look askance at our pet dog and
worry that contact with them could kill us. The parts
(15:14):
of the world where that is not true, where dog
rabies is still endemic, places like India and parts of Africa,
there are still a lot of human rabies deaths. I
think the who uses the number sixty thousand rabies deaths
are still happening every year around the world. That numbers
is really contested. It's been a real challenge getting the
(15:37):
vaccines and the other products that fight rabies to the
people who need them most. But those products are prohibitively expensive.
So raebies is considered a neglected disease by the international
health authorities. But people are still dying of rabies. And
then in parts of the world like Europe and the
United States where dog rabies is not the issue, we
(16:00):
do still have wildlife rabies.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
So like in the US, what wild animals have rabies?
Speaker 2 (16:05):
There's rabies adapted to fox, skunks, raccoons, and a whole
lot of bats in the United States.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Right, I read that, like, if you wake up and
there's a bat in your room, you should probably get
a rabies shot because bats can bite you and you
don't even know us.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yes, there's an argument for getting raby's vaccine if you
wake up in a room with a bat, although you
know you should consult your local.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Health Stuard writing the book change the way you think
about the relationship between humans and animals.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
I do think that there is a way in which
our relationship with dogs and cats especially, you know, the
sort of pure sweetness of it that a lot of
us experience now, like it was it had a darker
side in the pre vaccine era.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Your dog could turn into a monster and kill you
or your child. Yes, that was like a real thing
that could definitely happen.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
It was a real thing, and that was that made
it really hard to like love and baby our dogs
in quite the same way as we do today.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
So like this modern phenomenon of the dog being, to
what is arguably a weird extent, a part of the family,
and I include my own family as you know, in
that that like, you couldn't really have that without pasteur,
without the rabies vaccine.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
It certainly doesn't reach its sort of completion without that.
I mean, it's wonderful for those of us who love dogs.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Thank you, Monica, That was delightful.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah. Thanks.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Monica Murphy is the co author with Bill Wassick of Rabbit,
a cultural history of the world's most diabolical virus. Their
most recent book is Our Kindred Creatures. How Americans came
to feel the way they do about animals. We'll be
back in a minute to talk about the surprising way
that wildlife biologists are fighting rabies in America right now.
(18:08):
By the early part of the twenty first century, the
rabies vaccine had almost entirely eliminated rabies from people and
dogs in the United States, but the disease has persisted
in wild animals. I talked about this with Kathy Nelson
years ago.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
When I was in Vermont. We used to operate a
rabies hotline in the state. It would get calls in
from the public and we would sometimes go out to
investigate them, and we had a skunk that was trying
to bite the gas cap off of a lawnmower. And
they'll just bite anything that's in sight, because that's one
of the fascinating parts about the virus is that it's
(18:46):
designed to tell the brain to bite things.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Kathy is the wildlife biologist and the operations supervisor for
the National Rabies Management Program with the US Department of Agriculture.
For the past twenty six years, she's been part of
a federal program that has been fighting rabies in a
way that I have to say I found delightful. So
tell me about the first time you went up in
(19:09):
the air to fling rabies vaccines at the ground.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
Yeah, I still remember it was so exciting. You you know,
you help load all these baits onto a plane. You
walk up the little steps of the small plane, you
get in it, someone closes the hatch on you. You know,
the engines start, you take off. You're flying over beautiful
terrain and landscape, just beautiful agricultural forested land. And you know,
(19:36):
the person up front says, okay, machine on and you know,
baits are going down this little belt and I'm just
moving them around, looking out the window, seeing moose, deer,
you know, all kinds of wildlife. I couldn't literally could
not believe that I was getting paid to do a
job like this.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
What kind of planes were you going up?
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Then?
Speaker 3 (19:54):
They have a single wing, two engines.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
How many seats? Like, how small is it?
Speaker 3 (19:58):
If there were seats in them, there probably would be
it would probably be about a dozen seats.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
You're basically flying at a cargo van. Yeah, so these
baits are falling from this. Maybe this is a dumb question,
but like, is there ever any word they're going to
hit somebody on the head.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
Yeah, No, not a dumb question at all. Yeah, So
the navigator in the front seat, not the pilot, but
the other person who is a USDA wild Life Services employee.
They have an on off switch. So anytime we're approaching
a house or a road or a major body of water,
that switch goes off so that baits aren't distributed. You know,
over the course of a twenty five year program, we've
(20:37):
hit a roof for two. But fortunately, you know, once
folks learn about our program, they're generally really really accepting
of it, and you know, they're not too mad.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Is it happening like literally today? Is it happening this?
You know, we're talking in August of twenty twenty four.
Is there a plane in the air today?
Speaker 3 (20:57):
There is? Literally I got a text this morning saying
all five aircraft are taxing for run ups and take
off in Watertown. That's Watertown, New York.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Tell me about the baits, Like, what's one of look like?
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Tastes like, so we use different vaccine types. One of
them looks like kind of like a little ketchup packet
with a slight oil on the outside and attached to
that oil or tiny little fishmeal crumbs.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Fishmeal sounds delicious to a raccoon, I'm sure.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Yeah, Okay, So the other company they make a sweet
bait and it's a sugary, sweet like marshmallow kind of
sweet vanilla based bait.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Presumably you can't just like fling these things out of
an airplane over a city, right, So how do you
how do you do it? In you know, urban areas.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
Primarily we drive around in trucks. You know, someone's driving,
another person has the window down in the passenger seat.
They're tossing a couple of baits down. We record the
location of all of these baits with a GPS unit
so that we know where we've baited. Our biggest struggle
right now is because there's so many other food sources,
(22:04):
you know, trying to pull them away from a dumpster
full of pizza to eat eat one of our beats
is a real challenge.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
I have literally, say, a raccoon in Prospect Park in
Brooklyn eating a hole slice of.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
It's h yeah. They I mean, they're omnivores, so they're
gonna eat anything you know around. But we have done
a ton of research in urban areas looking at movement patterns,
home range sizes, because you have to get them right
in the right spot for them to even find them.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
So let's talk about the scope of the project now,
like what is the range of where you where you
do this.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
We have a band of vaccine distribution zone that goes
from Maine kind of across the Canada border down to
Ohio and then pretty much straight down from Ohio to Alabama.
And that's designed to stop the westward spread of raccoon
rabies and the northward spread into Canada.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Oh. Interesting, it's like a like a line of defense.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Yep, exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Was that the notion when you started was the issue, like, oh,
rabies is spreading, let's defend against the spread of rabies.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Yes. So the story of raccoon rabies is a really
interesting one. Raccoon rabies was first sort of documented in
the late nineteen forties in Florida. But then there were
some raccoon hunters from West Virginia, Virginia area who wanted
to replenish their raccoon supply. They went down It was
real commonplace back then to move raccoons around for raccoon hunting,
(23:33):
so they went down south, got some raccoons, released them
into an area on the Virginia West Virginia line and
inevitably released some rabid raccoons without knowing it, and then
raccoon rabies exploded from there. It reached most Northeastern states
by the early nineties.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
And is there risk of raccoons passing rabies to humans? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Absolutely. Over the years, there have been humans that have
contracted raccoon rabies. Certainly, human health and safety is always paramount.
Also animal health and safety. You know, every year there's
there's about three hundred cats in the US that die
from rabi's. There's about fifty dogs that die from rabi's.
It's a cost benefit sort of program where what it
(24:22):
costs us to manage our program is significantly less than
what it costs the American public to live with rabies
every year, just in terms of healthcare costs, you know,
public education, post exposure, prophylaxis, all of that adds up
really fast.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
So the program started in the nineties to stop the
spread of raccoon raybis. Has it worked? Did it stop
the spread of raccoon raybis?
Speaker 3 (24:48):
It did. After we distribute baits, about a month after,
we go back into an area and we use live
traps to catch raccoons. We take a blood sample from them,
pull a tooth, weigh them, sects them, take some general
notes on you know, their condition, and that blood sample
get sent off to the lab and that tells us
ultimately whether or not they have antibodies. Again, and the
(25:10):
tooth gives us their age and also tells us whether
or not they ate the bait because the bait has
a biomarker that stains their tooth. So that whole process,
that's our monitoring program, along with all the surveillance we
do where we do pick up dead raccoons off the
road and test them for rabies. The Centers for Disease
Control CDC has documented a seventy seven percent decline in
(25:34):
raccoons with raccoon variants since our program began in nineteen
ninety seven, so we know it's working. We've made significant
progress in being able to move that zone to the
east toward the ocean, which is what you know, our
ultimate goal is that bait zone of containment, and then
just keep marching it toward the ocean till, you know,
(25:54):
till you've eliminated the variant.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Right when you get to the sea, you're done. You're
like marching to the sea.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Yep, you're done.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
So, so you've been doing this a long time. You
are a wildlife biologist by training. I'm curious if your
career has changed the way you feel about wildlife, about
the relationship between humans and wildlife.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Yeah. I mean I love all wildlife, you know. When
I was in college getting my degree, you know, like
any wildlife professional, I think you dream of, you know,
working with polar bears or mountain lions or you know
some some big charismatic megafauna and you know, and I
landed on raccoons, but I wouldn't change it for anything.
(26:36):
They're so smart. They have not made a trash can
yet that they can't get into, or they're just you know,
if you have ever seen one up close or I
you know, I would encourage any listeners if they have
the opportunity and they see one dead on the road.
It sounds crazy, but just stop and look at it.
(26:57):
They're fascinating animals. They have little hands, just like we do.
They have an opposable thumb. Genetically, they're closer in origin
to bears than they are to like cat and dogs
and those kind of things. So they're just really smart animals.
They think about what they're doing. We have a National
Wildlife Research Center, and they did a side study where
(27:20):
they would put a marshmallow in the tub of water
and the raccoons would learn that all they had to
do was keep putting more rocks in the water till
that marshmallow rose to the top and they could reach
in and eat it. So that's just one example of
how smart they are and how if they're given enough time,
they'll figure something out.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Thank you so much for your time. It was great
to speak with you.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Yeah, you too, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Kathy Nelson is a wildlife biologist with the US Department
of Agriculture. Thanks to both my guests today, Kathy Nelson
and Monica Murphy. Next week on Incubation, I met on
my mind that I have to go do it, but
at the same time I was going to deal with
the beasts, which means I may not come back home alive.
(28:06):
Incubation is a co production of Pushkin Industries and Studio
at iHeartMedia. It's produced by Kate Furby and Brittany Cronin.
The show is edited by Lacey Roberts. It's mastered by
Sarah Bruguier, fact checking by Joseph Friedman. Our Executive producers
are Lacey Roberts and Matt Romano. I'm Jacob Goldstein. Thanks
for listening.
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Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com