Rabies as weaponry

Rabies as weaponry

Primarily we think about rabies and other lethal viruses as the subject of sad tales, of people who have become infected and inexorably die.  However, as I’ve written about in earlier blogs, rabies could become the basis for horrific weapons – not the painful, but fairly rapid death from sarin nerve gas, but horrific in the psychological and physical damage induced.  They will not be produced by rabies itself; for the virus to be an effective weapon it would have to be introduced directly into the nervous system, likely requiring some means of penetration the bony skull or spinal column.  Even then it would probably take some days for the effects to manifest, with certain death after a week or more.  Thankfully, we don’t have any direct information on exactly how quickly the symptoms and death would occur in humans given the rabies virus directly into the central nervous system… and hopefully we won’t!  The real threat will come from chemical compounds that act on the rabies receptor.  From these we could well expect to produce the rage, and attacks on other people, that rabies can produce as well as the muscle weakness.  Whether such compounds would kill is unclear since it is still unknown exactly how rabies results in death.

It is interesting that the use of the rabies  virus has been contemplated by a number of authors.  Below I copy an accounting of this.

“Rabies arrived in Greece in the fifth century BC. The ancient temple of Athena at Rhocca (Crete) was notorious for rabid dogs. Athena of Rhocca was invoked to cure human victims of rabies. In about AD 200, the natural historian Aelian described an experiment to cure some young boys who had been bitten by rabid dogs near Rhocca, whose ruins are found south of Methymna, Crete. A doctor administered the toxic stomach acid of seahorses to his patients in an attempt to counteract the mad dog “venom.” This early attempt to fight poison/venom with another poison/venom (anticipating the principles of vaccines, chemotherapy, and venomics) failed and the stricken boys died.
Aelian remarked that a piece of cloth bitten by a rabid dog could imbue the fabric with deadly saliva, causing second-hand infection of anyone who came into intimate contact with it. The virus can indeed infect via an open wound. Aelian’s ominous comment insinuates that mad-dog “venom” could have weapon potential.
Sure enough, historical detective work uncovers two intriguing formulas for creating biological weapons in an ancient Indian manual of warfare. The Arthashastra by Kautilya (fourth century BC) tells how to make many different types of poison arrows.
One recipe calls for mixing various toxins with the blood of a musk rat. “Anyone pierced with this arrow,” wrote Kautylia, “will be compelled to bite ten companions, who will each in turn bite ten more people.” The implication is that musk rats were a vector of rabies in India.
The other poison arrow recipe calls for “the blood of a man and a goat to induce biting madness,” which sounds suspiciously like rabies. Perhaps goats were susceptible to rabid animal bites.
Two thousand years later, in about 1500, the idea of “weaponizing” rabies occurred to Leonardo da Vinci, who envisioned a terror-bomb created from sulphur, arsenic, tarantula venom, toxic toads, and the saliva of mad dogs.

In 1650, the Polish general Casimir Siemenowicz entertained a similar notion. He suggested placing “the slobber from rabid dogs” in hollow glass or clay balls and catapulting them on the enemy to cause “epidemics” of rabies. The effectiveness of such weapons is dubious, but the diabolical intentions are chilling.

About the author: Adrienne Mayor is a Research Scholar in Classics and History of Science, Stanford University. She is the author of “Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World” (2009); and “The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy,” a nonfiction finalist for the 2009 National Book Award.

This article originally appeared at Wonders and Marvels.”

None of the methods mentioned would be very effective, at least immediately, because they still require the highly variable time from exposure to actual infection.  In present times, this would almost always be sufficient for prevention of rabies’ effects by treatment with the prophylactic vaccine.

Still, someday, the rabies receptor will be discovered, and the fearfulness of rabidity will become real.