I Stumbled upon this. I’d read this years ago, but with the popularity of Twilight and related vampiremania in pop-culture, I thought it worth posting:

Rabies causes hypersensitivity to strong stimuli, as well, so patients are often repelled by light, by bright things — such as mirrors, and by strong odors — including the smell of garlic. Rabies victims may vomit blood, Gomez-Alonso explains. And since the disease causes hydrophobia, or aversion to water, they do not swallow their saliva, which can froth at their mouths, flecked with blood.

The disease can also cause facial spasms, in which the lips jerk back over the teeth, in an animal-like snarl. Moreover, rabies is more common among men than women, as is vampirism, at least according to most vampire tales. Finally, rabies, like vampirism, can be transmitted via a bite, Gomez-Alonso writes. The infection, however, can also be transmitted via a scratch or across mucus membranes. Consequently, it can be contracted during sex with an infected partner, or by inhaling air in caves heavily populated by infected bats.

In addition to the medical evidence, Gomez-Alonso provides historical support for his theory. Digging through centuries-old European archives, he found records of a rabies epidemic among dogs, wolves and other animals in Hungary between 1721 and 1728, the time people first began to report sightings of “vampires.” There were reports, for instance, of people “who have been dead for several years, or at least several months& seen to return, to talk, to walk, to infest the villages& to suck the blood of their close ones, making them become ill and eventually die.”

Gomez-Alonso also found accounts of bodies, exhumed after burial, that appeared lifelike, and were filled with still-liquid blood. This also fits in with the rabies theory, he writes. When people die of collapse, shock or asphyxiation — as is often the case with rabies — their blood is often slow to clot. Moreover, the region of Hungary where the outbreak occurred is damp and cold many months of the year, significant because corpses take longer to decompose in the cold. “Their good appearance would also suggest the presence of saponification,” he explains. “This process, characteristic of burials in humid places, transforms the subcutaneous tissues into a wax-like substance.”

“Much evidence supports that rabies could have played a key role in the generation of the vampire legend,” later popularized in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” and numerous other books and films, Gomez-Alonso concludes. “This would be in accordance with the anthropologic theory that assumes that many popular legends have been prompted by facts. Under this approach, saying that the vampire is ‘mere fiction’ may be somewhat inappropriate.”