If you were to survive rabies, you could potentially develop a resistance to it. If an organism dies, well, they can't adapt to it.

Another thought I had: While killing the host is not ideal for a thing like a virus, but it does ensure the virus doesn't have to deal with competition either.

That's just my look at it.

That's the point. No one survives rabies, without vaccination or in one case I know of, extreme medical intervention.

Host can't develop immunity and pass that trait on through either horizontal or vertical gene transfer.

Killing the host also ensures other things that use the organism as a host also get wiped out.

Sort of like a biological kamikaze. There are some evolutionary advantages to killing the host as long as that lethality is not as strong as the ability to reproduce and the descendants get to new hosts.

Even the OP says it, why is rabies almost 100% fatal. 5% or a little less survive.

since it can’t leave one human host for another. Each human host is a dead end anyway. No pun intended.

It kills all of its hosts of any species.

During a lot of that time, an infected host can transmit it to others. Humans are an accidental host. The virus's "bread and butter" is small mammals - usually bats, rodents and others.

it doesn’t matter if it kills the host.

The reason a lot of things are not fatal anymore is because WE (the victims) adapt, not because the attacking organisms do. (And our own adaptations are a combination of natural selection, developing treatments/vaccines, and altering behavior.)

So to get back to the OP, nature/evolution says it's up to us to better resist Rabies, rather than being up to Rabies to become less dangerous to us.

If an organism is short-term lethal, then a mutation develops so one strain takes 2 years to kill instead of 1 day, the less lethal will spread further, it'll be more successful. The short-term lethal may not be rendered extinct (or it may, it's a random thing), but the distribution will certainly change. Some diseases have gone that way.

If as a result of not being as lethal critters develop an immunity, meh. There are species that require the death of the host, often because it's food for the young or it spreads by ingestion, but most are indifferent.

It really is in our interest to become resistant. But since that's also a random mutation that would have to spread, the pin-pricks that rabies causes to the H. sapiens "body" means that mutation would have to be very common, fix the problem all at once, and be dominant. And mutations seldom work that way.

Gad, I hate biology.

nt

to random mutations. Such a random mutation(s) that would make rabies less fatal apparently has not occured. Maybe it will in future, maybe not.

hasn't needed to, so there's no advantage to it. It could be out there, but it isn't being selected for.

Came out just a couple years ago. Book review in Washington Post was so wild I just had to read it. Tracks the history and pathology of the disease back to when “man” tried to domesticate animals for food and labor.

Later chapters dealt with a girl near Milwaukee, WI (late 1970’s...?) getting bit by a rabid bat while in church and how she managed to be one of the FEW to survive.

Trying to find my copy as I seem to recall one chapter dealt with animal to human disease transmission.

The descriptions of how the disease killed its hosts were just “Ho. Lee. Shit!!!” amazing.

On edit: It may be that rabies, unlike other diseases, attacks the brain so it is not human-human transmissible as with a flu or COVID-19. It is always fatal (if not caught EARLY) so developing a natural resistance is not possible.

be less than 100% fatal in other mammalian species, where it would be able to survive to be passed on. Killing our species off is a bug, not a feature.