Everything about Jeanna Giese totally explained
Jeanna Giese (born
1989) is the first person known to have survived symptomatic
rabies without receiving the rabies
vaccine. She is only the sixth person known to have survived rabies after the onset of symptoms; the other survivors suffered from
vaccine failures.
Infection with rabies
In
September 2004, Giese, then fifteen years old, and a student at
St. Mary Springs High School, picked up a
bat that she found in St. Patrick's Church in her hometown of
Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. She sustained a small bite on her left index finger, and having treated it with
hydrogen peroxide, her mother decided not to seek medical attention. This patient was infected on February 15 when several children were bitten by a cat in Santander de Quilichao, a small town near Cali.
Theories about survival
The reasons for her survival remain controversial. While the treatment appears to have worked as planned, her doctors suggest Giese might have been infected with a particularly weak form of the virus, or that the fact that she was bitten in a site far from the brain bought her unusually strong immune system sufficient time to fight the virus. When admitted to the hospital no live virus, only antibodies, could be isolated from her body, and the bat wasn't recovered for testing.
Other attempts
At least six later attempts to cure symptomatic rabies using a similar medical protocol have been unsuccessful. In May 2006, doctors at the
Texas Children's Hospital applied a similar treatment as used on Giese to Zachary Jones, a 16 year-old stricken with symptomatic rabies, but they were unable to save him. From early October to early November of 2006, 10-year old Shannon Carroll was also unsuccessfully treated. This protocol is commonly being referred to as the "Jeanna Treatment", at the Springs. An article written by her primary care physician in the April 2007
Scientific American calls this the
Milwaukee protocol; he indicates that those who attempted to follow this protocol actually violated it, failing to use the combination of drugs he first described.
Life after rabies
Jeanna Giese returned to school, and with the extra help of teachers, was able to complete her sophomore year with her class. Despite the obvious setback, she kept at the same level as the rest of her classmates. She graduated high school with honors in May 2007. She expressed her intention to become a
veterinarian after graduating. She is attending
Marian College in Fond du Lac.
Mayo Clinic neurologist Dr. Kenneth Mack described her condition as she entered college: she's recovered "remarkably well" and should continue to improve.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Jeanna Giese'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://jeanna_giese.totallyexplained.com">Jeanna Giese Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
