Rabies – Using One Health to Fight the Original Zombie Virus

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Lots of factors make rabies the scariest virus known. It kills virtually 100% of its victims, and it’s killing close to 60,000 people a year around the world – many of them young children. Animals can carry and transmit the virus even if they have no symptoms at all, and people can develop a fatal and untreatable infection even if they do not know they’ve been exposed by a bite, scratch, or a drop of saliva. 

Rabies is probably the basis for myths about zombies and vampires, says Dr. Abi Vanak of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) in Bangalore, India. It’s carried and spread by bats, raccoons, foxes, wolves, and, perhaps most important, dogs.

In this episode, Dr. Abi Vanak chats with us about how the One Health approach can help reduce the spread of rabies.