Spillover: the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

by David Quammen

Rabies also occurs sometimes in cattle and horses, but you seldom hear about that, probably because herbivores are less likely to pass the infection along with a furious bite. A poor rabid cow may let out a piteous bellow and bump into a wall, but it can’t easily skulk down a village lane, snarling and nipping at bystanders. Reports occasionally filter out of eastern Africa about rabies outbreaks in camels, which are especially worrisome to pastoralists who tend them because of the dromedary’s notorious tendency to bite. One recent dispatch from the northeastern Uganda borderlands told of a rabies-infected camel that ran mad and “started jumping up and down, biting other animals,13 before it died.” Another, from Sudan, mentioned that rabid camels get excitable, sometimes attacking inanimate objects or biting their own legs—which can’t do the camels much harm, not at that stage, but does reflect the strategy of the virus. Even a human in the last throes of rabies infection could potentially transmit the virus with a bite. No such case has ever been confirmed, according to WHO, but precautions are sometimes taken. There was a farmer in Cambodia, several years ago, who broke with the disease after being bitten by a rabid canine. In his late stages, the man hallucinated, he convulsed, and worse. “He barked like a dog,” his wife recalled later.14 “We put a chain on him and locked him up.”

Rabies is fucked uup!