It makes sense that a virus passed through saliva would evolve like this, but I just find it particularly unsettling when a pathogen can effect higher-level behaviors like drinking water (or jumping into water for mantises).
I wonder what progress has been made in addiction medicine for meds that simply prevent the development of tolerance? If possible, it would fall under the category of harm reduction. Failing the patient to get sober, they could at least continue getting high on the same amount which might prevent their failure to function.
When a neuron's receptors get strongly activated, that neuron can withdraw receptors from its surface into the interior of the cell (a process call internalisation), and from there either digest the receptors (downregulation) or move the receptors back to the surface of the cell where they resume their typical function (resensitisation). Those processes are potential targets for a tolerance-mitigating drug.
The tricky part is that they are very fundamental processes across all neurons and it would be very hard to target, say, dopaminergic receptors in the nucleus accumbens to ventral tegmental area (the "reward circuit") without also affecting neurons across the entire brain.
The best cure for tolerance is taking a break :) easier said than done, I know.
Well, there are two potential senses of "hydrophobia".
In its primary use, it means "rabies", and it's not really interesting that rabies would cause that.
In rare cases, it could mean "fear of water", which rabies doesn't cause. Rabies causes pain when swallowing. The pain causes fear through conventional mechanisms.
Rabies has also occasionally been referred to as hydrophobia ("fear of water") throughout its history. It refers to a set of symptoms in the later stages of an infection in which the person has difficulty swallowing, shows panic when presented with liquids to drink, and cannot quench their thirst. Saliva production is greatly increased, and attempts to drink, or even the intention or suggestion of drinking, may cause excruciatingly painful spasms of the muscles in the throat and larynx. Since the infected individual cannot swallow saliva and water, the virus has a much higher chance of being transmitted, because it multiplies and accumulates in the salivary glands and is transmitted through biting.
It seems more than just "pain when swallowing".
For what it's worth, I see the word pain as he used it to be a better fit than the word fear, as in phobia.
But anecdata at least suggests that being in enough pain can cause panic, but it might do so indirectly so that the fear is created around the inability to think the pain will ever end or at least lessen at least a bit.
Exposure to a stimulus is often both cause and trigger.
How is it that you’re an adult and still don’t know this.
Toddlers know this.
They’re just wrong. Neither panic nor fear is learned behaviour. What one panics about or fears is in part learned. But there is still a lot of instinct at play.
If I come into the room and stab you with a steak knife every time you drink, and sometimes even if you only think about drinking, you will definitely panic when drinking is brought up in the future, after some time.
Not sure what's wrong with you that you cannot empathize.
As I mentioned in a sibling comment, I think you've confused fear with panic. Fear can be conditioned, panic cannot. You can panic from fear, but it is not a guaranteed thing, and often, that panic is long after the fear is gone (aka PTSD).
Panic is an autonomic response to saving yourself at all costs. It is not something you "learn" or have "conditioned" into you, and if so, definitely not over the course of a few weeks that you have a virus; otherwise we'd all be dead from Covid and go into a panic every time we cough.
Panic is what causes you to drown a person saving you, so that you can breathe. Panic is what causes you to over-correct and steer into a tree. Panic is what causes you to run out of your house, in the middle of winter in pajamas, because there was a spider. Panic has a cause, but it is mindless with the only goal of saving oneself. The action itself is often quite stupid-looking, in hindsight and lack of context.
Most people have never seen a person panic, first-hand. Most people have never panicked. Today's world is largely safe, so it is easy to confuse fear with panic.
From the same Wikipedia article
> symptoms can include slight or partial paralysis, anxiety, insomnia, confusion, agitation, abnormal behavior, paranoia, terror, and hallucinations
There is more than just pain here. The virus changes the host behavior, making it more aggressive, so it is very possible that it also promotes a panic reaction to pain.
(Or more precisely, it’s already doing the math, and the current answer is that hydrophobia is the better solution [for rabies’ purposes])
if we need to continue the flawed math analogy; evolution has always done pretty imprecise cocktail-napkin math, even if it has been wildly successful at it.