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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)."
More details about this story here.
No, the article gives the family's explanation for why she got better. And, y'know what? If she was my daughter and she came down with rabies, I'd kneel so fast my knees would break Mach One--and I don't even believe in an interventionist God.
Are you really so completely lacking in compassion, empathy, the ability to understand someone else's problems? Their daughter contracted an essentially 100% fatal illness. If they want to credit their belief in pink unicorns for her daughter's recovery, more power to 'em. Guess what? They're terrified. They're under intense stress. They're not thinking rationally. They found something that gave them hope, and you're mocking it.
Is it desperate? Yes. Superstitious? Yes.
Is it hope? Yes.
If you want to sneer at hope, then to hell with you.
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.
"Well it's not Victory - but then it's not Death either."
What bothers me is how people always credit prayer while ignoreing the advanced medical care the girl recieved. Maybe, just maybe, that had something to do with it? The logical extreme of this beleif is faith-healers who refuse medical attention. I've read a story about a young boy with a tumor on his head so large he couldn't actually lift it anymore and his idiot parents jast kinda watched and prayed. Ugh.
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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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What bothers me when people credit prayer is that for every "success" there are probably many "failures". "God answered my prayers and saved my child." is an implicit claim that God didn't answer someone else's prayers. Thus someone who dies must either themselves be un-favored by God or the person doing the praying must be somehow lacking. From God's point of view ("Point Of View"?) it may make sense, but it seems less than comforting for those who've suffered a loss.
What the parent post objects to, and I fully share his consternation, is the statement:
"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."
Did they credit the highly skilled medical DOCTORS that administered her treatment? Did they credit the countless SCIENTISTS who have spent years developing highly selective and complex molecules which inhibit viral reproduction and allowed thier daughter to live? Did they credit the NURSES who cared for thier daughter in the hospital? No, and none of these were even mentioned. So do I sneer at hope? No, I do however sneer at the shameful insult of crediting to supernatural powers that which should be credited to the people who actually did save someone's life.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Not to drag this even deeper into a theological debate, but I find it odd that when prayers are unanswered the common reply is that "it was god's will" whereas when a prayer is answered the prayer itself is credited. Was your omniscient buddy asleep at the wheel and didn't notice until you gave him a heads-up? Is your diety responsive to bribes and begging?
Assuming a given of an interventionist, omnipotent, omniscient force (... in a vacuum of course) prayer itself should have absolutely no effect. Either it'll happen or it won't. Prayer is just a method of hoping that it happens and utterly ineffective.
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
When people pray, they are telling god, "this person's sickness also affects me", this forces a reevaluation if the punishment fits whatever crime.
Umm.. isn't God supposed to be omniscient and perfect? Wouldn't that preclude him having to "reevaluate" anything he does?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
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.
If you want to sneer at hope, then to hell with you.
I sneer at ignorance. It isn't that they prayed. It is that they credit the success to prayer above the actions of the doctors. It is that they don't accept responsibility for not treating their knowingly-bitten daughter in a timely manner. I'd think that the anti-viral drugs administered had something to do with the recovery, but the parents obviously think that prayer did more than modern medicine. If they thought so little about modern medicine, why even bother bringing in their child?
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I find the "Yahweh is complex" argument to be a cop out. You start with the premise that you want to believe in yahweh, then come up with beliefs about your god to justify it (without modifying any of your original premise). Prayer doesn't seem to effect much, so people come up with "god isn't understandable" argument. I guess.. but you ignore other equally plausible explanations. Maybe this yahweh person doesn't exist, or he's an evil god who just likes seeing people ask for things they won't get. Maybe yahweh does exist, but there's some secret code you need to put at the beginning for your prayer to get through. Ah, but that would be science. Religion doesn't like to modify its beliefs based on evidence.
Prayer may or may not be effective. There's no way to empiracally prove it one way or the other. Spending all of this time arguing about it, whether because you want to support your own belief in no God, or because you're scared of it, or for whatever other reason is pointless.
Pointless? How is a determining if your methods of curing disease actually help or not pointless? If it were we would have a great tool against curing disease. If all you're doing is helping people get through a tough time, hey that's great.. but wouldn't you rather know that?
It all seems far to convienent. Faith seems to boil down to "I want to believe, and will justify it by whatever means necessary". That's fine I guess, but stop trying to argue it's truth.
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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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Well, whatever you do, don't eat the bats near the church. I don't think they're healthy to eat.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
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.