Pets are good companions of human beings. They can give people a lot of company and happiness, but they also bring some risks. Why are rabies patients afraid of light and water? Today's editor will interpret it from a professional perspective.
When rabies attacks, it will show the symptoms of fear of water. Once the water source is seen, it is easy to fall into confusion, even feel difficult to breathe and collapse, so it is also known as "hydrophobia". Why do hydrophobia occur to rabies patients?
Rabies fear of water can be summarized into three mechanisms as a whole:
1. Rabies virus is neurophilic: rabies virus will spread centrifugally from the central nervous system to the peripheral nerve, and then damage various tissues and organs, especially the salivary nerve nucleus, the glossopharyngeal nerve nucleus and the hypoglossal nerve nucleus. The damage will be particularly serious, and clinical symptoms such as hydrophobia, dyspnea and dysphagia can occur.
2. Increased excitability of patients: after nerve damage, it will increase the excitability of nerves. When hearing or seeing the stimulus source, there will be manifestations of nerve excitability.
3. Conditioned reflex: rabies patients will be difficult to swallow due to the existence of laryngospasm. Even if they are thirsty, they can't drink water smoothly. When they see or hear the sound of water, they are extremely eager to drink water and can't. reflex causes laryngospasm, resulting in psychological fear.
After being bitten by an animal carrying rabies virus, it usually does not attack immediately, but has a incubation period of months to years. The length of the incubation period is related to the location of the wound, the severity of the injury, the number of viruses invading the human body, the type of virus and other factors. At present, the longest confirmed incubation period is 6 years.
Hydrophobia is only one of the symptoms of rabies, and there will be different symptoms in different periods of attack. The early symptoms were not obvious, generally low fever, anorexia, nausea, headache, general malaise and mild mental symptoms. By the middle of the period, the nerve excitability is obviously increased, that is to say, there will be fear of water, fear of light, dyspnea and paroxysmal pharyngeal spasm. In the late stage, the patients will be over excited and have paralysis symptoms, which is not far from death.
Rabies virus has a strong affinity for the nervous system, and the course of disease is very short after the onset of the disease. During the attack, the virus has invaded the brain, causing damage to the central nervous system. It only takes 24 hours for the virus to enter the brain and completely destroy the nerve. There is no medicine that can eliminate the virus and repair the nerve in a few days without damaging the central nervous system. Therefore, rabies Once almost 100% of the patients died, there is no effective method for the treatment of rabies in the attack period either in traditional Chinese medicine or western medicine.