Quarantine!

I went to go see Quarantine with some of my friends. I have to say that's the scariest fucking movie I've seen in awhile. (Suprisingly it didn't make me sick since it was made like the camera movements of Blair Witch and Cloverfield.) I knew it was a movie about zombies and I figured it'd have a lame plot like Dawn of the Dead but actually it was a very interesting plot. Instead of zombies appearing from out of nowhere or hell or something it was a biological attack from a doomsday cult. They actually made the Rabies virus ten times worse than what it was. One of the characters that's a vet actually said that he thought the people were showing signs of rabies. Victims started to show signs of infection very quickly.

Thanks to this movie I look at rabies totally different now. I'm not even vaccinated. (Costs $600--fuck that!) Rabies is a really painful way to die too. The period between infection and the first flu-like symptoms is normally two to twelve weeks, but can be as long as two years. Soon after, the symptoms expand to slight or partial paralysis, cerebral dysfunction, anxiety, insomnia, confusion, agitation, abnormal behavior, paranoia, terror, hallucinations, progressing to delirium. Hydrophobia is usually a big sign. (Inability to swallow and hypersalivation.)

In Rabies: The Facts, Kaplan et. al. describe several typical cases, including one of a 23 year-old Englishwoman:

“On June 17, 1981 she was bitten on the ankle by a dog in New Delhi. On August 18, about two months later, she experienced the first prodromal symptoms. She became anxious and depressed, and it became impossible for her to drink more than small sips of liquid. While sleeping, she frequently sat up in bed suddenly, terrified. On August 19, she became confused, hallucinated, and was incontinent of urine. On August 20, she was unable to eat or drink and was taken to the hospital where she hallucinated and screamed in terror. Misdiagnosed as a psychiatric case, she was injected with a tranquilizer and sent home, however she repeatedly woke up screaming in fear and became so wild and agitated that her husband felt he could not deal with her by himself and took her to her mother's house. She remained terrified, hallucinating and screaming in horror throughout the night. She had no water for almost three days. She fell into a coma the next morning, and died on August 23.”