Behind the Scenes Minis: Rabies and Jailbreaks

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This week we talked about rabies because Wow, I needed to know more than I knew about whether everybody got their rabies profyle axes after being bitten by the Capitol Hill fox. Right. Um, something I learned, Like to me, it is obvious knowledge that rabies is deadly, and that if you are bitten by a wild animal, particularly if you're bitten by a wild animal that seems to be behaving strangely, or if you're bitten by a bat, but other situations too, like you need to go to a doctor, you're probably gonna need to get rabies profyl access. Like this is not a thing that has any level of question or doubt or uncertainty. In my mind, some of the people who died of rabies in the United States just didn't know that being bitten by a bat needed medical attention. Um. Bad bites can also be really small and hard to detect, so that is a factor too. But like in those particular cases, it does seem like the people knew they had been bitten but just didn't think anything of it. Um. And then there was one person among those five who did receive rabies profylaxis but had like an underlying immune system disorder. That meant that it was one of the rare cases where that prophylaxis does not work. I decided maybe the reason I know this so intrinsically is because I was raised in the country by an anxious person. Uh. That taught me a whole lot about not touching bats, and not petting straight dogs, and not trying to pet wild animals, not just because of rabies. There are many good reasons not to try to pet wild animals. Right. We had a farm when I was young, and so I kind of got the like, if you see a dog or other animal that seems to be wandering around or is aggressive towards any of the animals you know as ours, please tell us immediately. Like I kind of got it that way well. And also um, through through the popular culture, such as Disney's Old Yeller. See I UM when you said the popular culture, I actually got excited because, uh, my two favorite animation shows, Home Movies, which is defunct and Bob's Burgers have covered rabies and Home Movies has a fabulous rap about Louis Pasteurs. So this episode was like me holding back the whole time. Oh yeah, Um, I thought about talking more about the rabies than popular culture, but there, I mean, there is just so much of it. It would honestly be a whole other thing, because like yeller, uh, there's that the sea and to Kill a mocking Bird. There's the entirety of coujo. Like, yeah, it just goes on and on and on and on. Yeah. I mean, my my immediate references are a little lighter, right, because Linda Belcher watches the raccoons in the alley behind the burger joint and has names for them like little King trash Mouth and El Diablo and um. At one point, one of them is in the house. I don't know. They're harboring a fugitive for reasons that I won't go into, but um, and they're trying to make sure the kids don't know there's a raccoon in the house because they get the kids to get bit and Linda says babies getting rabies. Um. And it makes me laugh every time because John Roberts is a genius. Yeah, I've never read or watched Kujo, but like, I still know that it's about a big rabbit dog, big rabbit dog. Like it's clearly it's right there altogether. Um, you were going to tell a bad story. Oh so I feel like I have been throwing my uh east mother under the bus a few times lately on behind the scenes. But this is another one. Because she was an anxious person and uh my parents had a pool. Uh they put it in after I moved away. But like my mom would love to as anybody would, particularly in the evenings, go would just kind of like lye and float in the pool. But bats realized that there was a pool there, and they would buzz the pool and like take a drink of water as they flew over, which I thought was amazing. But my mom would shriek, Like the shriek was more dangerous than the bats because it was like a tense And so I think about bats buzzing the pool and to get their water while she floated and her just losing her mind. When I was in high school, I was in a drum and bugle corps and we would be rehearsing outdoors in the summertime basically until it got dark and so we would be doing like our final run throughs of the whole show in the approaching twilight hours, and there was a bat roost somewhere on the campus where we were living and rehearsing, and as the sun started to go down, the bats would come out and they would fly around and you know, start they would basically be eating all the mosquitoes, which I was appreciative of, um and like that was I was. I always liked watching when the bats came out. But on the occasion when I have been somewhere where a bat is not supposed to be and there's a bat there, Like I remember one time also in high school, we were in a parking garage in downtown Winston, sale of North Carolina, and there was a bat on the floor and I was like, do not go near that. That is a problem, right, Well that's why, right A lot of bat rescue groups are like forever trying to post on social media like here's what to do if you see about on the ground. Probably not what your instinct is yet, don't Yeah, yeah, that's always tricky. Baths are very cool, and a lot of them are very cute, but in a whole lot of the world. There is also just like a small percentage of them have endemic rabies and like so just don't don't mess with them. Yeah, I um. I will tell a slightly horrifying story, okay, which is relayed to me by a former veterinarian that I used to have, who was telling me that a person had come to the clinic and like with a raccoon and had that she had found Oh it gets so much worse. Um, but thank goodness, that veterinarian is amazing. Um. And basically it was like the veterinarian was like, hey, we're not licensed to treat wild animals here, like we can't do this week. Um. But then like this woman is losing her mind and she's like you have to save it. My bed is like I think it's probably rabbit, and we're not you know, like we can call somebody and we can get to taken care of, but like not in this clinic. And then she found out that while this woman was ranting and having her moment in the vet clinic, her toddler child was in the car and the raccoon had ridden in its lap to the thing. And so my vet was like, I'm gonna call doctors nearby, Like, we're going to find an urgent care that can handle this right away. Yeah, if a person has a bite, I mean the bite itself can obviously be like a problem like that needs to be handled. But as far as the rabies profil axis, like that's an urgent matter, but not something that needs to happen right that second, which is good because sometimes even in places that have really robust medical systems, there's just not a lot of it. Same thing with snake bite. Uh, snake bite treatment and rabies treatment can both be incredibly expensive, even if you have insurance. In the United States. Um, I know somebody that got bitten by venomous snake and the bill they received was a five digit number. Um, which I will do. I hate all that. Oh yes, I was just gonna say that is a whole Pandora's bow thing. Um. But like some of it is is just because while there are a lot of people that get rabies pro flaxis every year, it's that it's not used as much as other drugs, and that it can be tricky to find a place that's equipped and knows what to do, and and all of that depending on exactly where you live. Um. There were people who got very upset about the Capitol Hill fox being euthanized. They could test it. We talked to the episode like that's the most the most reliable tests involved looking directly at the brain. Um. And then it's babies also have to be euthanized, and I think people were upset about that also, But like they had been exposed to their rabid mother, so like if they were not already developing rabies, they likely would have. Um. So yeah, yeah, a lot of raccoon rabies in the United States. A lot of bats also, indeed, But again, most of these things if you leave them alone, do call animal control if you notice a confused, seeming or aggressive animal that is not behaving correctly. But yeah, yeah, again, I am pretty sure that it is the most effective vaccine that we have. Is the the rabies proofyl axis a nearly one of effectiveness at keeping a person from developing rabies after they've been bitten or otherwise exposed. So anyway, uh, I think at one point I said I was not going to do any more episodes of disease eradications because we were going to run out of them. But boy, I would like it if we eradicated rabies, especially eradicated rabies in land animals, both for the greater ecosystem because a lot of those exposures come from land animals, and also the deaths to people. Yes, this week on the show, we talked about some prison escapes. We sure did, yeah, in an episode that was um inspired by a visit to the Eastern State Penitentiary. And now at that at this point, I don't remember exactly what year that happened. It was before the pandemic um and I was not sure what it was going to be like to go and visit it. I had some trepidations about it because there are some buildings that used to be prisons that now have been put to us. Is that just kind of make me uncomfortable because it's like, especially when we're talking about prisons that were built, you know in the seventeenth or eighteenth or nineteenth centuries or whatever, Like, there's a lot happening in prisons now today that is inherently cruel and inhumane, and that was even more so in a lot of the prisons in the past. Like there's just a lot of history there. Uh So, for example, when what used to be a prison is now a luxury hotel. I'm kind of like, I feel a little weird about that. And it was like I didn't really know. Yeah, I didn't really know what the historic site of the Eastern State Penitentiary was going to be like, but I did know that they have hatted houses and things there as as fundraisers, and I was like, I don't know how this is gonna feel. But what the prison or what the What the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site has really been focused on for the last few years is like criminal justice and criminal justice reform. So there are a lot of exhibits there that are about things like how many people that the United States in prisons compared to other countries, which is disproportionately an enormous number of people. UM. And there's a lot of stuff there, like a lot of exhibits that are about um conditions at the prison today. There are things that are like things from people who were housed there that were written in their own words. There's just a lot of stuff that's sort of about thinking about what incarceration means and what it has meant. And so after going there, I was like, oh, I did not I did not need to feel potentially icky, like I did the time I met some friends for a cocktail and it turned out to be at the luxury hotel that used to be a prison, and I was like, yikes, feel some yikes ways about this prison hotel. Let's let's go to a place that was folk entirely on dehumanizing people and enjoy a giblet, have some drinks and play Boschi or something. I don't know, And I think they are complicated. Uh, there are complicated questions about what to do with buildings that have that kind of history sometimes, but like luxury Hotel in particular is one of the weirder ones. Um So if you are in Philadelphia, that is a really interesting and thought provoking place to tour and walk around. Um there was a you know, guided audio tour that you could listen to while while they're the wall around it is so enormous and imposing that the idea that anybody tunneled under even just that part of it is huge. And then the idea that the tunnel also went under pretty much the length of the exercise yard was huge tunnel. Yeah. I UM that story and most of these really sparked the imagination because of how incredibly ingenious they are. I find myself going, if only the world had worked down in a way where these people with these kinds of creative problem solving skills were somewhere else putting that to work, what could they have accomplished? But in many cases they were not afforded those opportunities, right right? Uh? You know, there's there's a whole backstory context of all of these escapes about like this, the social and economic and other issues that have fed into like the system of incarceration that exists, which is a whole separate but related issue in a lot of ways, um and then connected to like to me, all the escape stories are also just like an expression of the inherent humanity of the people who have been h incarcerated. Have you been Alcatraz? I have only seen Alcatraz from the shore so um many moons ago. What year was that? Maybe? I was in San Francisco with Noll, who used to be our producer on this show, because we were working on drawing and we were doing some interviews there and we had just enough time to do like the boat ride around Alcatraz but not landing, which was very cool, but it was one of those things where like you, I had seen it from the shore, and I remember thinking, in my foolish way, huh, I wonder why this is so hard to escape from. It's not that far away, it looks doable. And then even when it looks very, very glassy and calm, you realize pretty quickly, like one, that those conditions can turn on a dime once you're out there in a boat, and too, like it's it looks way farther from the island to the shore than it does from the shore to the Lindy. If that makes Oh, you'd have to be like a trained athlete to really understand. Yeah, the water can also be really really cold, and and so that plays apart too. Um. I if I'm remembering rightly, you and I were on tour one time and I had we had a day off Francisco, and I d percent for sure arranged my day off to be in San Francisco. But I think what happened is I had a a travel delay that was just enough that all the things I had planned to do I no longer quite had the time to do, so instead I just walked around being a tourist. Uh. And that is when I saw it from the shore, and I feel like I had plans to maybe do the boat right around. I don't remember if I had tried to plan to get actually on the island, because I think it's a park now if I'm remembering right, that seems correct. I have not don't go out there based on what I just said, because I definitely did not look that up before saying that, Well, hopefully everyone look up such a thing before simply arrived here. Yeah, yeah, I did take I took pictures of it from the shore and looked at it through one of the uh one a little binocular things that you put quarters in. Yeah. I was startled at how little it is. Yeah, like I think in my head before I had ever seen it in person, which I remember the first time I saw it in person, but in my head, because I had heard it referenced in various you know, popular culture and whatnot, I just thought of it as this like huge looming structure out on an island, and no, it's a little place. Yeah. Um, I mean all of these words are relative, but it was much smaller than I anticipated. Yeah. Yeah, maybe someday we will see so Happy Friday again. Whatever is on your plate this weekend. I hope it is as good as possible. We'll be back on Saturday for the Saturday Classic. Um, I don't think the Saturday Classic this Saturday is the John Dillinger one. I think that's the actual next Saturday, unless I have remembered the calendar wrongly. So uh, just know that if you've been looking forward to it, and we'll be back on Monday. The brand new episode Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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