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)."

Comments

News article with more details

[Pervertus]

More details about this story here.

The first without the vaccine

[wscott]

From the other article:

Prior to Giese, there were only five documented cases of survival once clinical symptoms from rabies appeared, but each person had been immunized against the virus after being bitten

Re:The first without the vaccine

[Gadzinka]

But from the article on Wikipedia:

the handful of people who are known to have survived the disease were all left with severe brain damage.

Robert

Re:Not the first

[pkhuong]

Yeah, but were the three other people vaccinated?

*Adds more content* BTW, rabies has quite an itneresting way of spreading. Our neurons can be a meter long or more, and there's next to no metabolic activity on the axonal end (when compared to the pericaryon, the neuron's body). So, for the rest of the neuron to feed and communicate with the axon, there are two transport systems that go both ways. Rabies simply hitchhikes the slow stream that goes upstream to the pericharyon to travel from the periphery to the middle of the body :) That explains why we vaccinate people against rabbies after the fact: if the virus entered the body far enough from the central nervous system, the vaccine may have enough time to do its job. So, erh, if you ever have to be bitten by a rabid animal, make sure it bites you on the foot and not on the face!

Most of people in US get rabbies from bats

[Muhammar]

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.

In related news: the rabies vaccine has a cool his

[CodeWanker]

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."

Not the first

[Banner]

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.

NPR story much more detailed

[gCGBD]

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.

Re:She IS the first..

[gwynnebaer]

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.

Re:The article explains why she got better..

[joh6nn]

And yet Christians insist

that's exactly the attitude that makes it impossible to discuss hacking in public. 'cause, you know, clearly all hackers are evil and bad. they're young punks with too much time, and too little respect for private property; always hackin' the Gibson and what have you. i know, 'cause i seen it in the movies, and on the television.

the quality of christianity that's going to make it into the media, is the same quality of hacking, or of anything else, for that matter, that's going to make it there. and if it somehow, does manage to be something worthwhile, it'll be misrepresented (DVD Jon, for example, made it to the news when they arrested him, but he wasn't good enough for prime time when they acquitted him).

when you base your opinions of the whole group of people, off of the actions of a minority of that group, that's called stereotyping. it has a tendency to be grossly inaccurate. especially if your knowledge of those actions is second or third hand.