Four years after Jeanna Giese nearly died of rabies, she is being hailed as the first known person to have survived without a preventive vaccine. But Giese (pronounced gee-see) said if doctors can show that the treatment that saved her also spared other victims, she would be happy to share the credit. “You shouldn’t stop until it’s perfect,” Giese, 19, said in a recent interview about doctors working to improve the technology that might have kept her alive.
Geese’s wish might come true. Another young girl infected with rabies was alive more than a month after doctors induced a coma to stop her symptoms, as they did with Giese. Yolanda Caicedo, an infectious disease specialist at the Universitario del Valle Hospital in Cali, Colombia, who is treating the last survivor, confirmed a report in Colombian newspaper El País that the victim was an 8-year-old girl who had symptoms for a month around August , after being bitten by an apparently rabid cat.
The family was treated for the Bolivar bite at a hospital about a three-hour walk from their rural home, but the child, Nelsy Gomez, has yet to receive a series of vaccinations to prevent the virus from turning into full-blown rabies, Caicedo said.
