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15-Year-Old Girl Survives Rabies Infection
An anonymous reader writes "A 15 y.o. girl in Wisconsin is the first known survivor of a rabies infection who did not receive the vaccine. She was placed into an induced coma while doctors gave her a cocktail of drugs to help her immune system fight the infection. (For those of us who don't realize this, rabies is considered 100% fatal once symptoms appear)."
stuff that matters?
Scary shit.
More details about this story here.
..her family prayed. /me rolls eyes
Guess the submitter didn't RTFA this time... Three people in the world are known to have survived after the onset of rabies symptoms I remember reading in a Reader's Digest around 1970 about a young boy who survived rabies. They didn't induce a coma, but treated everything that happened from the rabies symptomatically.
"only three people in the world are known to have survived after the onset of rabies symptoms"
Unless you meant "100% fatal", which would mean those who died would be COMPLETELY dead...
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
Is she Rabies-Girl now? I smell big bucks.
Any explanation of why they didn't have the vaccine on hand?
[o]_O
It would be interesting to know a little more about the treatment. If they were using anti-virals, or something that affects the nervous system.
Viruses that I know infect the nerves: Polio, rabies, chickenpox (herpes zoster / shingles), herpes simplex.
There are vaccines for all but the last. Good anti-viral treatments, or anti-virals coctails that work well with nerve viruses might help with h. simplex, or h. zoster outbreaks.
"Well it's not Victory - but then it's not Death either."
You must be from another planet. Come visit earth some time, you'd love it! All our women are insane, and most will start to drool at the mere sight of a shoestore. Should be right up your alley.
On a related note, what are the women on your planet like? None of the girls I know will date me. I think its time I start considering my offworld options...
Also, it seems that the symptom profile from bat rabbies is slightly different than the textbook rabbie from rabid dog. The initial spastic phase is somewhat less pronounced with bat rabbies. Anyway, if the patient survives through the spastic phase, it is usualy the paralysis that gets him at the end. The very few survivors are vegetative.
The brain pretty much self-destructs because of the inflamation. So in this case, they induced the coma and avoided the immunization to limit the inflamatory process.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
Jensen said the Giese family credits the power of prayer for providing strength in Jeanna's fight with the rabies virus, and they asked for continuing prayers for her full recovery.
The girl got bitten in church! Do they also "credit the power of prayer" that she got infected with rabies and nearly died?
Shes a witch, burn her.
Its news for medical/scientific nerds. I find it intereasting, because everyone else who goes untreated has died, so this is definantly some important, or at least semi interesting news.
At least to someone like me. Louis Pasteur created it first by removing the spinal cords of rabbits who had died of the disease and drying them for various lengths of time. Then he'd grind them up and innoculate the victims in stages: first innoculation, from spinal cord dried for 14 days. Next one, 13 days. The victim got fresher and fresher cord powder to trigger an immune response.
I remember reading about that in the kid-version of his biography when I was 9 years old and thinking, "Golly, he was smart."
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
She is not the first to survive it, others have survived it as well (two that I know of, one was in India I beleive). In both cases however they'd have been better off dead due to tremendous brain damage. The big problem with rabies is the swelling of the brain.
Whether or not God exists is irrelivant.
My mother had serious medical problems last year that would have killed 999 out of a thousand people.
She told everyone that would listen that God had given her the gift of a new life and she never ever ever blamed God for putting her in a position that would require a miracle for her to survive.
Everytime a doctor gave her a timeline on recovery my mother marked her calender, in ink, because she new God would heal her.
At every step of the way she had a positive attitude and her doctors agree that is what the difference.
Prayer doesn't work better then medical science however, but with a serious illness many times nothing more can be done medically, it's up to fate. And a positive attitude (prayer helps with this) helps turn fate your way.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
The story on NPR tonight about the pediatrician who figured out how to save her is really an amazing work of doctoring.
You can listen to it here.
O=='=++
All Things Considered interviewed the doctor who apparently directed this girl's treatment (and devised a very creative approach to the problem).
A link to the RealAudio/Windows media file is here.
-Troy
She appears to be doing better now. But soon, she'll be trying to suck your brains from out of your still screaming body. Either that, or a monstrosity will burst out from her ribcage and start stalking the medical staff...
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...person to survive rabies. first known survivor of a rabies infection when the article states: But only three people in the world are known to have survived after the onset of rabies symptoms, according to state health officials.
Behold.. the power of... CHEESE!
(the article says it's because of the power of prayer that she appears to be recovering.. but.. it's because she's in Wisconsin. And there's so much CHEESE!)
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
To survive without getting the vaccine. It appears that all the other survivors took the vaccine, developed symptoms, but still survived. She survived and didn't take the vaccine at all. That's the crucial difference.
eh, my grandmother was told in 1981, just after my mother died, that her stomach and ovarian cancer would kill her "within about 6-8 months". Her doctor went into the Peace Corp, and died of apparently absolutely nothing while working in a field, about 6 months after telling her that.
My grandmother passed away 4 weeks after I graduated from High School, in 1994.
She always attributed it to that when my mother told her that she "didn't think she was coming back" the last time mother went to the hospital, mother had made grandmother promise "to make sure that my kids make it through school". And she did. Didn't make it two days past actually getting my diploma in the mail, though.
Hope and determination work in mysterious ways. People call that God. I call it "hope and determination".
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Smart? Sounds stupidly brave ;) I wouldn't touch a dozen rabbits that had rabbies, pull out the spinal cord, and muck about with it.
Lets look at this without trying real hard to be special.
"Jensen said the Giese family credits the power of prayer for providing strength in Jeanna's fight with the rabies virus, and they asked for continuing prayers for her full recovery."
once again
"Jensen said the Giese family credits the power of prayer
for providing strength
in Jeanna's fight with the rabies virus, and they asked for continuing prayers for her full recovery."
for providing strength.
Doesnt say it cured her.
Could easily mean it proveded strength to THEM, as a family. Because, as you might know, prayer is a very emotional thing, something that can fill one with hope. I doubt they are unaware or unnapreciative of the medical treatment, and certainly seemed to indulge the medical communities likley expensive and thankfully succesful attempt.
for providing strength.
If you're going to vociferously beat a dead horse, you could at least make sure it's a horse...
she's a vampire now...
watch her closely...
--
The treatment was a classic hack - everyone KNEW that rabies was 99.999999999999% fatal, and that the handful of survivors had brain damage. This doc didn't just tell the family "sorry, there's nothing we can do but make her comfortable and hope she pulls through, and get ready to cope with the brain damage when she does." He did some quick research, came up with a theory for how he might treat her, and tried it - and it worked. This is the hacker ethic *saving lives*. I can't think of any story that belongs on /. more than this one. If I ever meet this doc, the first drink's on me.
Ok, more than twice as many nines as is strictly accurate . . .
The largest number of animals that are infected are raccoons on the East Coast: Raccoons: 2778 Skunks: 2223 Bats: 1240 Foxes: 453 Cats: 249 Dogs: 114 Cattle: 83 Coyotes: 8 CDC Statistics Human cases 1990-2002: Bats: 27 Dogs: 9 CDC Statistics
I grown tired of the word hacker in every aspect and every definition. Hacker ethic, get a life.
More to the point: this is the hacker ethic. You know, the term was a complement -- meaning a computer artiste -- way back long before the little kiddies started trying to break into the pentagon.
Thanks, I thought that was an important point missing in the article.
Same story for me. My father died less than one year after I managed to be accepted in a physics school with a huge bursary ; he had been on chimiotherapy for 10 years before, with three remissions, and morphine and blood transfusions only for more than two years.
Yeah, and who was the weird fucker that first thought of drinking cow's milk? You just know that sick bastard was doing something else before he decided to "milk" his cow.
Couldn't agree more. Science is hacking nature, in a good way. And the scientific process was open source long before computers were invented. Kudos for this guy who went against what 'everybody knew' and saved the girl. This is science with concience
Why do people think that's very weird? We drink our mother's breast milk. calves drink their mother's breast milk, and so on.
I suspect the first person to do it couldn't produce milk, and wondered if cow's milk would be okay for the child. It doesn't seem that much of a jump.
In My opinion, the most interesting thing about rabies is that it virtually doesn't exist in Australia. That is, our animal quarantine laws and methods mean that there are no infected animals to give the disease to people. I love my country for that and other reasons.
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte