Well, the first time’s always a miracle. After that, it becomes pedestrian.
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Does this signal the end of rabies as a fatal disease?
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I doubt it very much. You’ve got to have a high level of medical technology put someone in a coma for a week, support them, and then revive them, put them thru therapy, etc. It won’t benefit 3rd world nations, where people are dying of rabies daily.
But if you have rabies, get diagnosed at the right time, have a tertiary hospital nearby, good insurance and an otherwise healthy constitution, then the disease is no longer 100% fatal.
I don’t think this procedure itself (the coma part) is anything new. They treated her with some other unique meds too. It was the whole fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants approach and some ingenuity that saved her. I kind of doubt that the disease now has a reliable treatment. Every new case will tend to be unique to itself.
This makes me very happy. I’ve been entertaining an unreasonable fear of rabies for quite some time now. By the time you notice symptoms - it’s too late! Or, it USED to be.
My father was a missionary doctor in Indonesia in the 60s, and he saw far too many cases of rabies in humans. He used to tell the story of a man who’d come into the hospital already showing signs of hand tremors. He said he injected vaccine into the man’s spinal column, and the patient survived (although with some neurological deficiencies). I’d never questioned the story, but when I see a statement like “only five people in the world are known to have survived…” after the onset of symptoms, I start wondering if he embellished the story a bit. It’s far too late to ask him, though - does anyone know if one of the five was a man on Sumatra sometime between 1965 and 1970?
I was bitten by my dog when we were in Indonesia, and he turned out to have rabies. I had the series of injections in my stomach, and I can attest to the unpleasantness of the experience. My dad was also exposed, and he not only had to have the series, he had to administer them to himself.
I’m sure that more people survived rabies after late and extreme vaccinations such as you describe, that just never got documented. Unless your dad took steps to report this case to the medical literature, there’s no way for the medical community to include it in the data. And I’d wager that, out in the sticks like he was, there were more important things to do than report such data.
I can’t answer your question (I asked an immunologist almost the exact same question once and didn’t get a satisfactory answer [satisfactory to me, at least]); however, I would point out that rabies vaccine isn’t the only example of after-the-fact innoculation. Tetanus shots are given after an injury. I read somewhere (sorry, no cite) that a smallpox vaccination given after exposure but before symptoms is effective. There’s probably others.
LaurAnge, me too. I’m glad I’m not the only one, as everybody around me thinks it’s a little bit nuts that I’m so afraid. But… it’s just the nature of it, like you said… Once you know you have it, it’s (or it was???) too late. Very disconcerting. Especially after you’ve read about cryptic rabies cases on the CDC web site, where people get the disease with no history of an animal bite. :eek:
ggurl, everyone thinks I’m crazy too. We can be crazy together. Ah, the wonders of the message baord - bringing people crazy about obscure things together, all over the world.
According to Bat Conservation International, there are only 2 reported cases of this
However, you can get Histoplasmosis from breathing in the spores of a fungus that grows in bat droppings. If conditions are right, this can occur outside.
Most people who are infected won’t notice it, or will think it’s the flu.
