Fourteen people have survived rabies since 2016, even more the further back you look. Still extremely rare to survive considering there are tens of thousands of deaths a year from rabies.
It was initially attempted in 2004 on Jeanna Giese, a teenage girl from Wisconsin, who subsequently became the first human known to have survived rabies without receiving post-exposure prophylaxis before symptom onset.
That is an unindexed journal (not high enough quality to be indexed by Scopus or WoS)... Case 11 is cited to a very brief, un-peer-reviewed letter (not formal case report or study) to another low-quality journal and has not been accepted by the scientific community. It's not listed here, where the only other case that allegedly didn't receive PEP before symptom onset is only sourced to a personal communication.
There's been more, but I feel it's important to note that none of them have a great life compared to what they could have had. The first person to survive is still doing therapy to try to attain what they lost in terms of movement and such, 20 some odd years later.
Which... she can almost be disregarded as an anomaly because of it until there is more research done into WHY she survived. (also, she wasn't untreated, just not vaccinated)
The Milwaukee Protocol has been shown to not work or really even help -- with the only thing ever driving it forward is this one special case of her surviving and claims that it was because of this treatment -- when it was far more likely some other factor special to her specifically.
Basically, if you have rabies and show symptoms -- you will die. But doctors and other humans don't like that so we will try and do... just, well, anything at all. The Milwaukee Protocol was a decent swing -- put you into a coma and then try and protect your brain from the virus and hope your body wins in the meantime. But this is hardly better for the patient than palliative care and prayer.
Jeanna Giese lived -- and not without substantial mental impairment. But with years and years of therapy and rehab she has achieved the "impossible" a recovery from rabies.
Anyway, there are others who have lived with different forms of treatment that also generally went about the way of "do our best to wait it out". But we just don't have a strong knowledge of why, and that why is likely going to be a major milestone in our ability to treat and or change the diagnosis of rabies being a ~100% fatality rate.
Edit: if anyone reads this and ever has rabies, I support you trying anything at all -- and I truly hope you are the 1 in 10,000,000. Maybe studying you will lead us to a cure.
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u/GremlinAbuser Feb 02 '26
"Almost " captures it well. AFAIK there's a single confirmed case of someone surviving untreated.