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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)."
Scary shit.
More details about this story here.
..her family prayed. /me rolls eyes
Yeah, but were the three other people vaccinated?
:) 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!
*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
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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.
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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...
Any explanation of why they didn't have the vaccine on hand?
It wasn't a case of there not being a vaccine on hand, it's that you need to receive a series of vaccine shots over a period of weeks before symptoms appear, which usually happens weeks later (up to a year in some cases). This girl and/or her family, didn't seek treatment for whatever reason, early enough. Once symptoms appear, all the doctors can do is make you as comfortable as possible. It is considered to be fatal 100% of the time once the symptoms appear.
These doctors tried a whole new approach. Protect the brain as much as possible while letting the body develop its own antibodies. While the girl's body appears to have defeated the virus (our body's self-defenses are amazing!), it's still to be determined how successful the doctors were in preventing brain damage.
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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.
So while we're at it -- how does that play in to the induced coma as part of the treatment? IANAMD, but I'm speculating that less neural activity (either in the brain or up/down the spinal cord for movement) means fewer neural firings, and consequently slower neural transport, and therefore more time for the vaccine to work?
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.
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=='=++
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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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.
she's a vampire now...
watch her closely...
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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.