Physicians at the Medical College of Wisconsin treated a 15-year-old girl, bitten by a bat and already showing rabies symptoms, by placing her in a drug-induced coma paired with antiviral medication, buying time for her own immune system to respond.
The team gave her ketamine and midazolam to suppress brain activity, along with the antivirals ribavirin and amantadine, while intensive care supported her heart, lungs and other organs for weeks. She survived with some lasting neurological effects, becoming the first documented unvaccinated rabies patient to live through the infection.
The approach became known as the Milwaukee protocol and was attempted on other rabies patients afterward, but it rarely succeeded again, and later reviews questioned whether her survival depended on an unusually weak viral exposure or a partial pre-existing immune response rather than the coma itself. Confidence in the protocol as a reliable treatment has since declined considerably.
Read the original study
Willoughby et al., NEJM, 2005 · doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa050382
One survival did not make the method reliable.
Source
- Willoughby, R. E., Tieves, K. S., Hoffman, G. M., Ghanayem, N. S., Amlie-Lefond, C. M., Schwabe, M. J., Chusid, M. J., & Rupprecht, C. E. (2005). Survival after Treatment of Rabies with Induction of Coma. New England Journal of Medicine, 352(24), 2508–2514. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa050382