lets talk
RABIES
By Danielle G. Timothy RN, BSN SWUPHD Epidemiologist
I
t was in France, July 1885 when 9-year-old Joseph Meister was bit by a rabid dog and brought to a physician for care. The doctor realized he would not be able to save little Joseph and sent the patient and his family to a local scientist, the famous Louis Pasteur, who had previously discovered how to make vaccines for cholera and anthrax. A rabies vaccine had been tested on dogs with great success, but had not yet been used on humans. In consultation with three other doctors in the area, Louis Pasteur and his team decided that if they did nothing, the boy would die, and therefore it would be best to attempt to save his life by trying the vaccine. The 9-year old was then injected with dried-out rabies virus from the spinal fluid of a rabid rabbit. Pasteur’s theory was that if someone was exposed to a weakened version of a disease, the body would build up a defense mechanism to fight off the real thing. The child was given 13 more rabies injections over the next ten days. Three months later, Louis Pasteur announced that the child’s life was no longer in danger. By 1886, he had successfully treated 350 rabies patients. Due to Pasteur’s discovery and advances in medicine over the past century, average rabies deaths in the United States have decreased from over 100 to two, annually. According to Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR), Utah has had 59 instances of a person being exposed to a confirmed rabid animal since 2016, with one fatality in 2018. In that same time period, 98% of wild animals testing positive for rabies by the Utah Public Health Lab were bats, followed by an occasional fox or skunk. HEALTH MAGAZINE | WINTER 2022
