Woman Who Was First to Recover From Rabies Without Vaccine Marks 20th Anniversary

A woman in Wisconsin who survived a harrowing brush with death is celebrating a major milestone this year.

Jeanna Giese became the first person in the world to survive rabies without receiving the life-saving vaccine 20 years ago.

“It’s almost surreal to think, ya know, 20 years,” she said. “My life changed completely when I got sick.”

She was attending church one Sunday morning with her mother when a bat was seen flying around during the service.

“It flew to the back of the church and one of the ushers swatted it down,” Giese said.

Being an animal lover, Giese asked her mother if she could pick the bat up and take it outside. Her mother gave her the OK.

As she was about to place the bat into a tree, she said it bit her and changed her life forever.

Jeanna Giese spent months in the hospital as a teenager Jeanna Giese spent months in the hospital as a teenager(Jeanna Giese) “It did manage to stretch over and bite me in the finger and that hurt,” she said. “I always get asked, ‘Did it hurt? Did ya feel it?’ Yeah, I felt it. It hurt a lot.”

The mark left by the bite was almost microscopic. She said she wasn’t bleeding at the time because there wasn’t an open wound.

Giese and her mother cleaned the bitten finger with hydrogen peroxide and went on with their lives.

“I woke up and I could not get out of bed, my face was flush, I could hardly move,” she said.

Once there, doctors tested her for meningitis and Lyme Disease among many other conditions. All of the tests came back negative.

The doctors were stumped as to why Giese was so sick. As Giese’s condition continued to worsen, the decision was made to transfer her to Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Wauwatosa.

Dr. Rodney Willoughby, a pediatric doctor specializing in infectious diseases, said he was brand new at Children’s Hospital when Giese became his patient.

“This was actually the second time I was on call here. I knew nobody,” he said.

Dr. Willoughby sent samples from Giese to the Centers for Disease Control in Georgia where the diagnosis was confirmed. Giese had rabies.

“Well, I thought she was going to die,” Willoughby said. “That’s what they all did, that’s about the extent of my knowledge of rabies at the time was that there wasn’t much to do. It’s really 100% fatal.”

Willoughby said it was too late to administer the life-saving rabies vaccine at that point.

“The classic, conventional rabies vaccine has never failed since its introduction in the United States in the 1970s,” he said. “It’s probably our most efficacious and effective vaccine, although fortunately, we don’t have to use it often.”

At this point, the doctors hit a crossroads. Giese said doctors told her parents that she would either die in the hospital or they could take her home so she could die there.

However, Willoughby wasn’t ready to give up just yet. He decided to try something experimental.

“Whenever you improvise, the odds are against you, so you always worry,” he said.

Willoughby decided to put Giese in a medically induced coma, a move never attempted before with a patient suffering from rabies.

In 2004, Jeanna Giese was put into a coma in a last-ditch effort to save her life In 2004, Jeanna Giese was put into a coma in a last-ditch effort to save her life(Jeanna Giese) “He kind of came up with this idea to put me into a coma to kind of separate my brain and my body and let my own immune system fight off the virus,” Giese said.

Willoughby said he came up with the concept because rabies typically kills patients by causing the brain to overstimulate the heart, eventually making it stop.

“So, the idea that we could just suppress the brain so it couldn’t work as hard and so that it didn’t stop the body from living, that seemed like a reasonable idea and almost seemed too obvious,” Willoughby said.

“They didn’t know if I woke up if I was going to be me or a vegetable or anything,” she said.

“He (Willoughby) said, ‘Look over at your mom,’ and I moved my eyes and that’s when they were like, ‘She’s in there,’” Giese said.

“I was basically a newborn baby at the age of 15. I couldn’t do anything,” she said.

“We had no idea how she was going to come out of it. We had no idea what the complications were,” he said.

Over the next few weeks and months, Giese slowly started to regain control of her life. She re-learned how to walk and underwent strenuous physical, occupational and speech therapy.

“The road to recovery was very long and painful. I don’t quit. I guess it’s personal stubbornness,” Giese said.

Giese is now known around the world as a medical marvel. She is the first person on record to survive rabies without getting the vaccine.

She has been extensively covered by local media, including when she graduated high school and when she became a mother.

Giese is now a mother of three and works at the Children’s Museum of Fond du Lac.

“I always wanted to be a mom and now I am one and it’s just fantastic. I love my kids so much,” she said.

According to Willoughby, there are just 45 known survivors of rabies. He said 18 of those survivors overcame the virus by what’s now called the “Milwaukee Protocol.”

“She’s done everything that you’d want for any of your patients, so it’s just a total delight,” Willoughby said.

Years later, Giese is still an animal lover, even extending her compassion to bats.

According to the CDC, this may be because of “successful pet vaccination and animal control programs and public health surveillance and testing.”

Why do they call it a vaccine when you get it post infection?

You get the shots post exposure, pre-infection — rabies has a long incubation period. You can take a series of rabies shots over a period of months, and build up an immunity. Fur tappers do that, or used to.

Pilsner
Member, Doctors Without Diplomas

interesting paragraph from the Willoughby paper:

‘Neither rabies vaccine nor rabies immune globulin was administered because of the patient’s demonstrated immune response and the potential for harm from a potentiated immune response.8 Amantadine (200 mg per day, administered enterally) was added on the fourth hospital day because of its in vitro activity against rabies virus, as well as its antiexcitotoxic activity, which is distributed more rostrally in the brain than is that of ketamine.9,10’

so no jab was administered, per commonsense, traditional medical practice. you just don’t jab into the teeth of an infection (and so neither do you into the teeth of an epidemic) as was done with the wuflu.

and the rabies infection was treated rationally with antiviral and apparently supplements like Vit C. makes good sense to me as a non-physician. interesting that the treatment strategy also has parallels to the anti-viral treatments that Zelenko and Frontline docs suggested and practiced for the wuflu, i.e., instead of the lungs, they apparently were medicating to try and limit the inflammatory immune response in the brain.

Given that even with this protocol survival rates are still low, I would be interested in adding Ivermectin or HCQ to this protocol.

These drugs have shown success in preventing viral replication.

If you can reduce viral replication perhaps you can reduce the time in a coma and reduce nerve/brain damage.

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