Girl survives rabies, goes home

WAUWATOSA, Wis. — A Fond du Lac teenager who became the first person known to survive rabies without a vaccination went home yesterday after nearly 11 weeks in the hospital, officials said.

Equally as impressive is 15-year-old Jeanna Giese's recovery. Her body is undergoing a "rebirth," physicians said yesterday. Nerves ravaged by the disease are reconnecting to muscles and organs including her heart, a phenomenon that the medical community will monitor for years to come.

She was infected when a bat bit her at church in September, but she did not immediately seek treatment. She began showing symptoms of rabies in mid-October.

"My biggest goal when this started, when I walked through those doors downstairs, was to someday take my daughter through those doors back out, and today that gets to happen," Giese's father, John Giese, said yesterday before the family left the hospital.

Jeanna Giese in recent weeks has worked to regain her weight, strength and coordination, although she will need physical and occupational therapy.

The new growth is forcing the resilient girl to again learn the use of her arms and legs, to speak and to swallow. Physicians expressed amazement yesterday that she mostly can dress herself, walk from a wheelchair to bed and send e-mail to high-school friends.

The physician who led her treatment team at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin said he never had seen such an "evolution of healing," nor had his colleagues at other national and international medical institutions. "She's one of a kind," said Rodney Willoughby, the pediatric infectious-disease physician.

The disease did not affect the girl's intellect, Willoughby said, and she can return to school when physically able.

Physicians gambled on an experimental treatment and induced a coma as part of efforts to stave off the usually fatal infection. Only five people besides Giese are known to have survived the rabies virus after the onset of symptoms. Unlike Giese, they either had been vaccinated or had received a series of rabies vaccine shots before showing symptoms.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is re-evaluating its approach to human rabies because of the results.

Willoughby said the girl's treatment must be duplicated in another person before it can be credited as a rabies treatment.

"I don't recommend you do stuff before you try them on animals, but in this case we didn't have time," he said. "This was stitched together in four hours, discussed in an hour. It just turned out we were very lucky. Jeanna was very lucky."