Apparent treatment for rabies — Science News, December 4, 1971
The painful and at all times deadly virus illness rabies might ultimately be licked — not with the normal sequence of rabies vaccine photographs that generally push back the illness after an individual has been bitten by a rabid animal, however by the well timed use of comparatively easy medical strategies.… As a consequence [a 6-year-old boy] is the world’s solely identified survivor of rabies.
Update
Though the boy was vaccinated, the photographs — which have improved for the reason that Nineteen Seventies — didn’t forestall illness. Medical strategies used to deal with him, together with inserting a tube to assist him breathe, giving seizure medicine and draining fluid buildup on the mind, proved that rabies sufferers can survive. Yet the illness remains to be virtually at all times deadly as soon as individuals present signs. In 2004, a 15-year-old lady turned the primary identified unvaccinated rabies survivor (SN: 1/29/05, p. 77). Doctors handled her utilizing the Milwaukee Protocol. This controversial technique places sufferers in a coma to guard the mind whereas the immune system mounts defenses. But even with that therapy, most sufferers nonetheless die.