Top 50 years ago, a 6-year-old boy became the first known rabies survivor - Apparent cure for rabies

Though the boy was vaccinated, the shots — which have improved since the 1970s — didn’t prevent disease. Medical techniques used to treat him, including inserting a tube to help him breathe, giving seizure medication and draining fluid buildup on the brain, proved that rabies patients can survive. Yet the disease is still almost always fatal once people show symptoms. In 2004, a 15-year-old girl became the first known unvaccinated rabies survivor, Doctors treated her using the M­ilwaukee Protocol. This controversial method puts patients in a coma to protect the brain while the immune system mounts defenses. But even with that treatment, most patients still die.

A 15-year-old girl has become the sixth person in medical history to live through an advanced case of rabies, and the first one to do so without receiving the rabies vaccine. She received a novel therapy, and scientists are now considering whether it was the key to her recovery. When Jeanna Geese of Fond du Lac, Wis., was admitted to Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee last October, she was lethargic and had experienced several days of double vision, fatigue, nausea, and some numbness. Her prospects were bleak because a month earlier, a bat had bitten her, says pediatrician Rodney E. Willoughby, who has treated Geese ever since she arrived at the hospital. Like most physicians, Willoughby had never seen anyone with rabies that had progressed to symptoms. The rabies vaccine cures most people bitten by a rabid animal in developed countries, but if a rabies exposure goes untreated, the patient almost always dies within days of the appearance of symptoms. Somehow, Geese pulled through. She’s still weak and barely able to walk but is back home undergoing physical therapy. While Geese was in the hospital, Willoughby and other physicians designed a bold new treatment for her. But even they can’t say whether their approach cured her, or whether some resilience on the girl’s part or some characteristic of the rabies virus that infected her permitted her to recover. “There are years of work, potentially, in trying to answer some of these questions,” says Charles, chief of the Rabies Section at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, who collaborated with Willougbhy and others on the case. Their success could rekindle experimentation on animals for developing new rabies treatments. Meanwhile, Rupprecht says, the response from the scientific community has been a mix of admiration, disbelief, and a “wait-and-see attitude.” After all, he notes, “this is a sample size of one-over 4,000 years.” The rabies virus may take the express train to the brain. By hijacking a transporter protein and hitting the gas, the disease-causing rabies virus races up long nerve cells that stretch through the body, researchers report  August 28 in PLO S Pathogens. The new work “is very promising,” says virologist Monique Lafon of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and could give researchers another target in their search for therapies against rabies infections. With a fatality rate near 100 percent-higher than Ebola-rabies stands among the most deadly diseases in the world. The virus lurks in the saliva of infected animals and passes to humans, most commonly through a bite. Then it steals up the nerves and into the brain, killing cells and often triggering bizarre behaviors, such as hyperactivity and a fear of water