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15-Year-Old Girl Survives Rabies Infection

Posted by timothy on from the not-quite-out-of-the-woods dept.

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)."

7 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. News article with more details by Pervertus · · Score: 3, Informative

    More details about this story here.

  2. The first without the vaccine by wscott · · Score: 5, Informative
    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
  3. Re:Not the first by pkhuong · · Score: 3, Informative

    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!

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  4. Most of people in US get rabbies from bats by Muhammar · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    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
  5. In related news: the rabies vaccine has a cool his by CodeWanker · · Score: 3, Informative

    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."

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    "Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
  6. Not the first by Banner · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  7. NPR story much more detailed by gCGBD · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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