I’ve had a run on questions about survival of rabies virus outside the body. The topic comes up periodically with respect to touching roadkill or veterinary clinic personnel working with animals that have been attacked by an unknown animal. The case of three people who developed rabies after taking care of a sheep that had been attacked by a rabid animal, probably through contact with saliva from the rabid animal on the sheep’s coat coming into contact with broken skin on their hands, shows the potential risk. An important part of assessing the risk is understanding how long the virus lives outside the body.

Some viruses are very hardy and can live for weeks or even years outside the body. Parvovirus and norovirus are classic examples of this type. Some viruses, like HIV, die very quickly in the environment. Part of this relates to whether they are "enveloped" or "non-enveloped" viruses. Enveloped viruses have a coating that is susceptible to damage from environmental effects, disinfectants and other challenges. Damaging this coating kills the virus. Non-enveloped viruses don’t have that susceptible coating and that is in part why they are so much hardier.

Fortunately, rabies is an enveloped virus, and it doesn’t like being outside of a mammal’s body. Data on rabies virus survival are pretty limited, since it’s not an easy thing to assess.  To look at rabies virus survival, you have to grow the virus, expose it to different environmental conditions, then see if it’s still able to infect a mammal or a tissue culture. We can do this easily with bacteria, but growing viruses is more work, especially a dangerous virus such as rabies virus.

I can only find one study that has looked at rabies virus survival (and I can only read the abstract since the rest of the paper is in Czech). The study (Matouch et al, Vet Med (Praha) 1987) involved testing of rabies virus from the salivary gland of a naturally infected fox. They exposed the virus to different conditions and used two methods to look at the infectivity of the virus.

  • When the virus was spread in a thin layer onto surfaces like glass, metal or leaves, the longest survival was 144 hours at 5 degrees C (that’s ~ 41F).
  • At 20C (68F), the virus was infective for 24h on glass and leaves and 48h on metal.
  • At 30C (86F), the virus didn’t last long, being inactivated within 1.5h with exposure to sunlight and 20h without sunlight.

So, rabies virus can survive for a while outside the body. Temperature, humidity, sunlight exposure and surface type all probably play important roles, but in any particular situation you can never make a very accurate prediction of the virus’s survival beyond "it will survive for a while, but not very long."

From a practical standpoint, it just reinforces some common themes:

  • People should avoid contact with dead or injured animals.
  • Veterinary personnel or pet owners dealing with a pet that has been attacked by another animal should wear gloves, wash their hands and take particular care if they have damaged skin.
  • People who are at higher than normal risk of being exposed to potentially rabies-contaminated surfaces should be vaccinated against rabies.

Image: Schematic diagram of a rabies virus showing the outer viral envelope (source: CDC Public Health Image Library)