Informative Speech On Rabies

Have you ever heard the phrase “frothing at the mouth?” Maybe the word “lyssa?” Have you ever read the book Cujo, or heard the word “hydrophobia”? Have you wondered about one of the deadliest viruses known to humankind? There is one thing all of those have in common, and that is rabies. Rabies is a virus, and it attacks the nervous system of its host, eventually becoming deadly. However, it can all be prevented with a vaccine. However, before you can understand how the rabies vaccine works, it is important to know how rabies itself functions. It is a virus, which means it can only reproduce within live cells. However, unlike other viruses, rabies only infects mammals. It gets into an animal by a bite by which saliva may enter into the wound. A bite is the …show more content…
Then, in the middle of a big rabies outbreak in Paris, a vet sent samples of rabid dogs to Louis Pasteur, a french scientist who had success with conquering germs in the past, with a request to try and create a potential vaccine for rabies, and such began his work. After many years of studying the rabies virus, Pasteur made the prediction if he left infected tissue to dry, the virus would become weaker. And, as later experiments showed, that theory was correct. That was and still is called “attenuating” a virus, or is called an “attenuated” virus. Attenuate means to make weaker, so when a virus is attenuated, it is made weaker and less potent by various ways. Attenuating the rabies virus was the theory behind making the rabies vaccine. Eventually, attenuating the rabies virus paid off. In 1884, Louis Pasteur announced that he made a breaking discovery. He had, after many years of work, created a vaccine that used an attenuated rabies strain to protect dogs that had been exposed to the fatal rabies vaccine. Pasteur was revealed for this groundbreaking and lifesaving discovery, but his work wasn't done yet. He still had to create a cure for