<story><title>Bacteria hijack a meningeal neuroimmune axis to facilitate brain invasion</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05753-x</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fnordpiglet</author><text>Rabies is generally fatal and is not new or genetically novel, and like the article linked, is a CNS infection that travels the peripheral nervous system.  First recorded case was 4000 years ago, suggesting it’s likely ancient through pre-history.</text></item><item><author>ramraj07</author><text>This brings up an important point many folks may not realize: our immune system a robust multilayered, highly redundant response against any normal bacterium or virus. Thus, Any pathogen that currently still causes disease by definition has to code multiple specialized workarounds that hack these immune responses.&lt;p&gt;And importantly, pathogens that cause fatal diseases are typically not very old in evolutionary time scales, it’s generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect, and most of these pathogens are considered to be in the path towards evolving into more benign invaders of their hosts.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ramraj07</author><text>Viruses like rabies are interesting because they are actually not as serious in the species they evolved to infect; just turns out they rapidly kill some other species (us) that they don’t care about.&lt;p&gt;Make no mistake, rabies virus also has multiple immune evading mechanisms that are unluckily supercharged in humans.</text></comment>
<story><title>Bacteria hijack a meningeal neuroimmune axis to facilitate brain invasion</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05753-x</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fnordpiglet</author><text>Rabies is generally fatal and is not new or genetically novel, and like the article linked, is a CNS infection that travels the peripheral nervous system.  First recorded case was 4000 years ago, suggesting it’s likely ancient through pre-history.</text></item><item><author>ramraj07</author><text>This brings up an important point many folks may not realize: our immune system a robust multilayered, highly redundant response against any normal bacterium or virus. Thus, Any pathogen that currently still causes disease by definition has to code multiple specialized workarounds that hack these immune responses.&lt;p&gt;And importantly, pathogens that cause fatal diseases are typically not very old in evolutionary time scales, it’s generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect, and most of these pathogens are considered to be in the path towards evolving into more benign invaders of their hosts.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kevviiinn</author><text>AFAIK is also isn&amp;#x27;t super contagious, less opportunity for it to evolve</text></comment>