A teen in Wisconsin survived rabies. Has an animal ever survived rabies?

[raccoon]

I mean, an animal under observation by scientists/doctors?

[HereSince1628]

1. You mean a differnt species of animal.

I seem to remember think skunks have a very high tolerance for rabies.

[Dr. Strange]

2. Apparently, yes.

A teen in Wisconsin.

:)

</smart ass>

[Ian David]

3. Maybe it was all the cheese? n/t

[DS1]

4. That wasn't rabies, just a Packer fan seeing Favre in a Jet's uniform

[benld74]

5. Cheney did, but he was left with the sneer of a smile(nt)

[sam sarrha]

7. na.. that Fuck'r still has it.. look what he did to Iraq.

[sam sarrha]

6. my grandfather said around 1912 a community member went into full blown symptoms, a traveling doctor...

gave him an injection of an unknown substance, he said it would either kill him or cure him .. then he left. grandpa said it dried him out so bad all his skin pealed off like a bad casi of sun burn.. but he survived.

gramp's had hundreds of rabid animal stories, born in 1887..

he said that when people got bit they were put in a small windowless room and cared for a couple weeks. if they came down with symptoms they'd wait till a pause in between the fits then a group of the bigger men would rush thru the door and smother them with a mattress.

[raccoon]

8. Wow, he had some interesting stories to tell. nt

[semillama]

9. "unknown substance"

Huh - wonder if it was alum by any chance, considering that rabies was also called "hydrophobia" and the part about drying out. I guess a biochemist might be better qualified to speculate than me, of course.

[kestrel91316]

11. If he survived without benefit of post-exposure prophylaxis, he surely

did not have rabies. Nobody except that one lucky girl has ever survived it without benefit of PEP, even with 21st century medical care. I think there are a couple cases from the 20th century of people who "survived" rabies (they were never the same afterwards) but they had been given all or part of the old NASTY PAINFUL postexposure prophylaxis, the 21 shots in the abdomen.

Nowadays with the new PEP series, if you get it in a timely manner and it is given properly, your risk of actually getting rabies is about ZERO.

We cannot use PEP in animals. It's illegal to do so. If an animal has symptoms and history consistent with rabies it must be destroyed for proper testing so that any exposed humans can be given the PEP in a timely manner.

[raccoon]

13. Why did those shots have to be in the abdomen? nt

[kestrel91316]

10. Not to my knowledge.

[Orrex]

12. Jeanna Giese, in 2004

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanna_Giese

I could have sworn that I read of a boy who survived rabies some years earlier, but the article on Ms. Giese says that she's the first to survive it. Without an article about any earlier case, I'll take their word for it.