I was bitten by a mad dog twenty years ago. There was no rabies vaccine at that time. It took me ten days to get the antiserum. It still is.

The incubation period of rabies may be as long as forty years? Fifty years? Even for life. Is China going to set the Guinness Book of Records again? In some professional magazines and even textbooks in China, the incubation period of rabies is often described as decades.

Are these "cases" in China really rabies? Because there is no laboratory diagnosis basis, or it is impossible to prove that no new infection has occurred recently (for example, through some special or rare ways), these "cases" have not been recognized by international academic circles, and even passed down as jokes internationally, as an example of the low level of related science in China.

Domestic and foreign data show that the incubation period of rabies is usually 1-3 months, and the incubation period of a few serious head and face bites may be as short as 7 days, and the incubation period of a few cases (less than 1% of the total) may exceed one year.

At present, the longest incubation period of rabies recognized by the international mainstream scientific community is 6 years. American scholar 199 1 reported the case in a professional magazine. The deceased was a Filipino immigrant who never left the United States after immigrating to the United States. Because the probability of rabies infection in the United States is extremely small, and the results of partial gene sequence analysis prove that the rabies virus isolated from the brain of the deceased is the same as the strain prevalent in the country of origin of the deceased, this report proves with the most convincing evidence so far that the incubation period of rabies may be as long as 6 years.

Due to the small number of similar cases and the incomplete evidence chain, the relevant academic circles still have objections to the case report. For example, many French scholars believe that cases with incubation period of more than one year, if any, are very few, and the possibility of recurrence after one year is slim. They all laughed at the idea of extending the incubation period.

Too many people have been bitten by dogs in China for decades. If the incubation period of rabies is really that long and so many people have to be vaccinated, then the annual vaccination amount of rabies in China will increase by a considerable amount. Many phobia patients are scared silly by the legend that rabies has a long incubation period.