When Calpurnia sees the dog walking lopsided down the street, she immediately knows what is wrong with him– he has rabies. Rabies is a terrible disease, but it seldom affects domestic animals today. Most pets are vaccinated for the disease when young, but during the 1930s when people could not afford to pay for shots for their pets, it was still a common occurrence.

Rabies is caused by a virus which is passed from one animal to another through a bite that breaks the skin. All warm-blooded animals can get rabies, including dogs and humans. It is almost always fatal unless a painful series of vaccine injections is given to the person bitten. Most cases of rabies today are due to the bite of a wild animal like a skunk, raccoon, or bat.

There is an incubation period of several weeks, and then the person becomes depressed, anxious, and irritable and begins to have trouble breathing and swallowing. He becomes extremely thirsty but cannot drink. Thick mucous collects in his throat, and in terror, he vomits. A fever rises while the person has seizures, paralysis, and eventually enters a coma. This lasts for three to five days until the person dies from encephalitis which the virus causes and during which the virus produces, moving along nerves to the brain. Here is what happens when a person gets rabies: Rabies Symptoms

Two forms of rabies affect animals: furious rabies and dumb rabies. Furious rabies follows the same course as rabies in humans, and the animal, which becomes very irritable and bites and snaps at any living thing it encounters. In dumb rabies, there is little or no irritable stage, and the animal becomes paralyzed before it dies.

The way in which rabies is spread was first recognized in In 1884, Louis Pasteur developed a successful vaccine. Today an anti-rabies serum is injected in the person who has been bitten by a rabid animal, and this is followed by a fourteen to thirty-day course of daily, painful, vaccine injections. Booster shots are given ten and twenty days later. Human rabies immune globin is also given.

Until this century, many infectious diseases abounded. Antibiotics to cure the infections had not yet been discovered, nor had inoculations been developed to prevent people from catching them. At any time, a family might be decimated or wiped out by some terrible, contagious disease. Now we have vaccines for many of these diseases and antibiotics to treat them. Research on of the following diseases which has plagued humans. Create a 5- slide PowerPoint with illustrations and facts describing the disease, its cause, its treatment, and whether or not it has been eradicated. Poliomyelitis Tuberculosis Mumps Cholera Hantavirus Smallpox Scarlet Fever Measles Chicken pox Bubonic Plague Acquired Immuno-deficiency Syndrome (AIDS virus) Ebola Virus