Rodney Versus Death

Summary

Radiolab – "Rodney Versus Death"
Release Date: August 13, 2013
Hosts: Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich
Producers: Tim Howard
Guests: Ann and Gina Giese, Dr. Rodney Willoughby, Monica Murphy, Bill Wasik, Dr. Amy Gilbert, Dr. Sergio Recuenco, others

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Overview

In this gripping Radiolab episode, the team delves into the story of Gina Giese, a young woman who became the first person known to survive clinical rabies without prior vaccination. The episode masterfully weaves together medical investigation, the nature of rabies, and humanity’s age-old struggle with the disease. It centers on Dr. Rodney Willoughby’s radical and controversial attempt to save Gina’s life, challenging rabies' near-mythical status as a universally fatal disease.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Gina’s Mysterious Illness & Diagnosis (02:12–07:09)

• Setting the Scene: Producer Tim Howard visits Ann Giese in Wisconsin to recount how her 15-year-old daughter, Gina, fell suddenly and inexplicably ill in 2004.
• Symptoms Progressed Rapidly: Gina experienced tingling, double vision, fatigue, involuntary muscle spasms, and slurred speech, eventually becoming almost comatose.
• The Crucial Detail: Ann reveals that Gina was bitten by a bat a month prior while trying to rescue it during church mass—an overlooked fact until her condition worsened.
• Diagnosis: Upon hearing about the bat bite, the pediatrician immediately suspects rabies, and Gina is rushed to a specialist.

"His face turned white. He walked out of that room. He says, I'll be right back. But he never told us what it was."
— Ann Giese, 05:36

The Fatality of Rabies (06:34–12:22)

• Expert Testimony: Dr. Rodney Willoughby, infectious disease consultant, describes rabies' horrors—both physical and psychological.
• Rabies is Almost Always Deadly: Public health experts Monica Murphy and Bill Wasik state the fatality rate is virtually 100% once symptoms appear.
• Historical Desperation: The show highlights centuries of failed 'cures,' including bizarre remedies like applying a rooster’s anus to bite wounds (08:57–09:56), reflecting sheer desperation.

"Of the percentage of people who come down with symptoms of rabies who die, it is the deadliest disease in the world."
— Bill Wasik, 06:51

• Viral mechanism: Rabies enters via nerves (not blood), crawling toward the brain at a slow but relentless pace. Vaccine is only effective if administered before symptoms.

Rodney’s Wild Idea: The Milwaukee Protocol (12:34–18:32)

• Desperation and Innovation: With no standard cure, Dr. Rodney Willoughby researches rabies’ effect on the brain, proposing that the virus disrupts rather than destroys neural function—possibly allowing for recovery if the immune system gets enough time.
• Induced Coma As Treatment: Rodney improvises, placing Gina into a medically-induced coma to "buy time" for her immune system to respond—a last-ditch, untested, and controversial plan.

“If you could buy Gina's immune system some time, enough time, you could clear the brain, and the brain would not be damaged.”
— Dr. Rodney Willoughby, 15:54

• Family’s Perspective: The decision is made under emotional duress, with Ann focusing only on the hope of survival.

Struggling Toward Recovery (17:04–21:39)

• A Long, Uncertain Wait: Gina is kept in a coma for multiple weeks; prayers and uncertainty fill the hospital room.
• Signs of Hope: After a week, Gina’s spinal fluid shows rising antibody levels; the immune system is fighting back.
• Awakening and Aftermath: Initially, Gina is locked-in—conscious but paralyzed—a moment Rodney calls "the worst day of my life" (19:13). Slowly, she regains movement.

“And it was the worst day of my life because it looked like she was probably going to survive, and we’d actually done worse than death."
— Dr. Rodney Willoughby, 19:13

• Recovery: Over months, Gina relearns to walk and talk, eventually returning to a near-normal life, retaining some impairments but developing a new appreciation for bats—her former nemesis.

Was It the Protocol or Gina? The Controversy (22:09–28:04)

• Replication Worldwide: The "Milwaukee Protocol" is attempted worldwide with mixed results—about five survivors out of thirty attempts (22:09–23:10).
• Are Some People 'Immunologically Special'?: Research in Peru finds some villagers have rabies antibodies but never got sick, hinting at rare natural resistance.
• Gina’s Unique Immunity?: Evidence emerges that all survivors had pre-existing antibodies, suggesting the protocol may only work—or is only tried—on people already mounting an immune response.

"They would say that the Milwaukee protocol should be discontinued and that we shouldn't be wasting time and money on it."
— Monica Murphy paraphrasing other researchers, 27:44

Scientific Uncertainty and Ethical Debate (28:04–30:07)

• Skepticism: Critics argue effort and resources are better spent vaccinating at-risk populations than experimenting with the Milwaukee Protocol, especially given its low success rate and unknown mechanism.
• Rodney’s Defense: Dr. Willoughby insists hope and continued innovation are vital—citing the evolution of cancer treatments as precedent for incremental progress.
• Current Status: He reports a 20% success rate for the protocol, far from a cure but better than the previous 0%.

"That's a lot better than zero."
— Dr. Rodney Willoughby, 30:05

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• "You die, basically. You die? Yeah. Well, like what, all of the time? Some of the time. All of the time."
  — Jad Abumrad and Monica Murphy discuss the lethality of rabies (06:34–07:09)

• “Her brain activity looked great, and she had nice pupils, but physically, she did not move a muscle.”
  — Dr. Rodney Willoughby, on Gina's locked-in state (18:47)

• "She is the poster child for what became known as the Milwaukee Protocol."
  — Robert Krulwich, 21:53

• "It was almost as if they were immune to rabies. Huh."
  — Jad Abumrad, on findings in Peru (25:05)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 02:12–05:36: Gina’s symptoms and discovery of the bat bite
• 06:34–07:09: The certainty of death with rabies
• 08:57–09:56: Historical rabies “cures”
• 12:34–18:32: Dr. Willoughby’s decision for induced coma & beginning of Milwaukee Protocol
• 18:44–21:39: Gina’s awakening, slow recovery, and psychological impact
• 22:09–23:10: The protocol's global application and success rates
• 23:28–25:55: Studies on natural rabies immunity (Peru, Texas cases)
• 27:44–28:15: Criticism of continued Milwaukee Protocol use
• 29:18–30:07: Rodney on the value and ethics of continued innovation

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Conclusion

"Rodney Versus Death" is an exploration of medical bravery, the unpredictability of science, and the thin line between hope and hype. The episode leaves listeners questioning assumptions about what’s “impossible,” highlighting how even a deadly disease like rabies can have cracks in its certainty of death. Whether Gina survived due to Rodney’s bold intervention or an unusual immune response, her story—and Rodney’s willingness to try—marks a turning point in humanity’s fight with one of nature’s most feared killers.

"Because whether or not you think that he saved her life or she saved her own life, the fact is that at least now we know that rabies isn't quite the killer that we once thought it was. He took it off of its throne of death, even if, you know, just a little bit, maybe."
— Jad Abumrad, 30:55

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Transcript

[A]

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[C]

Okay.

[A]

All right.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

All right. You're listening to Radiolab Radio from WNYC.

[C]

And npr.

[A]

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab, the podcast. Today on the podcast, story about death Incarnate.

[C]

Incarnate.

[A]

Incarnate, I think. I think Incarnate Incarnate. If that was Tim Howard, our producer. I'm sorry, am I in here yet? No, you're not supposed to be in yet. Wait, A story about death incarnate and the man who. Well, who thought he could beat death? Yeah. Are you Anne? Yeah. Nice to meet you. I'm Tim.

[B]

Nice to meet you.

[A]

Comes from our producer, Tim Howard. But you're already here, so just start. Okay. So late last year, I took a trip out to Wisconsin.

[B]

Test one too.

[A]

It was like that first weekend of November when we were out there for the. For the live show and I met this woman, Ann Gezi, to talk about her daughter Gina. Do you mind telling me just like where you're sitting? What room? Crazy story.

[B]

I am sitting in the kitchen of my home in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

[A]

All right, so Anyway, back in 2004, in September of 2004, her daughter Gina was 15, sophomore.

[B]

I remember it was homecoming week, so they had all activities each day and.

[A]

Dress up days and Gina's a volleyball player and one morning she just starts to Feel kind of crappy.

[B]

She started getting a tingling in her left arm. We thought maybe she had a pinched nerve or something. Thought nothing of it.

[A]

Then she goes to a volleyball game. Somebody, I guess, sets the ball to her to spike, and she looks up and she sees two of them, and she doesn't know which is the volleyball. Double vision? Yeah.

[B]

About a week later, she started getting flu like symptoms.

[A]

She has headaches. She feels really sluggish each day.

[B]

She just got more tired.

[A]

One of those days, she does go to school, take the PSATs, but then the next day, she can't even get out of bed. They go to the doctor, and he says, well, it's not the flu.

[B]

So we went home. And then she just kept getting worse. Her arm started to involuntarily jerk. Her speech started becoming real slurred. Her body kind of stiffened up. Like, we'd get her up to go to the bathroom, and she just. Just. It was just really scary. Weird how her body was just stiffening up.

[A]

Ann and her husband John took her to a neurologist for some tests.

[B]

Just trying to get down to the bottom of this, you know, and what. What is going on with her? Because the meningitis came back negative. Everything else they were testing for came back negative.

[A]

Were they running out of things to test for?

[B]

Yeah, they pretty much didn't know what else to do.

[A]

A day later, on a Saturday, Gina's hospitalized. And then on Monday, when her pediatrician, who had seen her on Friday, came in and saw her and saw how.

[B]

Much worse she was in just two days, he was, like, frazzled, like, what is going on here? And then something just made me tell him about the bat.

[A]

Bat? Yeah. So this was a month earlier. Gina and her family, they were at mass.

[B]

It was St. Patrick's Catholic Church, you know, old big church.

[A]

And a bat was flying around, and it was just kind of bothering everybody.

[B]

It would just, like, land on behind the altar, the stained glass windows up high. It just seemed like it wanted to get outside. And there were open windows. It's like, go. You know, they're right there. Go. But it just. And then it would swoop down, and it started getting lower to the people's heads and stuff. And there was an usher. He hit it to the floor. I don't know what he used. But Gina kept looking back at it, and being the animal lover she is, she thought she had to help it.

[A]

And so she jumps up, runs over to the bat, grabs it by the wings and takes it outside. And as she does, the bat Bites her on the index finger of her left hand. So it breaks the skin? Yeah. They washed it and then thought nothing of it. But when Ann told the pediatrician about this, he.

[B]

His face turned white. He walked out of that room. He says, I'll be right back. But he never told us what it was.

[A]

They immediately rush her to Milwaukee to this other hospital, Children's Hospital, Wisconsin, to be treated by this guy.

[D]

I'm Rodney Willoughby. I'm an infectious disease consultant.

[A]

And at the point when Rodney met.

[D]

Gina, she was what we call stuporous.

[A]

You mean like she couldn't talk? She could, but barely.

[D]

She was talking only single sentences, could only follow a one step command. She was in a wheelchair because she couldn't physically stand.

[A]

Her left arm would twitch and spasm.

[D]

She would apologize, say sorry, and then try and get back into position for the exam.

[A]

And she was literally getting worse by the minute.

[D]

Within two or three hours, she had to have a breathing tube put in. She was essentially becoming comatose. The way she looked, I wasn't sure she was going to survive. And of course, if she had rabies, I pretty much knew she wasn't going to survive.

[A]

Rabies? Yeah. If you are diagnosed with rabies, then what do you do? You die, basically. You die? Yeah. Well, like what, all of the time? Some of the time. All of the time.

[C]

It's a really deadly disease in terms.

[A]

Of the percentage of people who come down with the symptoms of rabies who die, it is the deadliest disease in the world. The deadliest? Yeah. Here's the bottom line.

[C]

If we say there are 55,000 cases of rabies a year, then you also have 55,000 rabies deaths a year, meaning it's 100% fatal.

[A]

Yeah. And by the way, this is Monica.

[C]

Monica Murphy, I'm a public health veterinarian.

[A]

And this is Bill, Bill Wasek. I'm a senior editor at Wired magazine. And they wrote a book called Rabid where they trace the history of rabies all the way back to the beginning of the. There are references to rabies going back as far as we have human writing in the Sumerian literature, in the Akkadian literature. For thousands of years we have been throwing everything and anything we can think of at this disease and failing. I mean one like real. I mean, from the start you see these very, very weird cures. Desperate. For example, in Roman and Greek times, if you're a Gena and you got bit by a bat, you might have tried eating a cock's brain. Goose grease mixed with honey. The flesh Of a mad dog salted, the skin or old slough of a serpent, A clod from a swallow's nest applied with vinegar, and then we have the dung of red poultry, provided it is of a red color, is very useful. If those didn't work, you could pull out the feathers from around a live rooster's anus and apply the anus to the bite wound on the theory that said anus would suck the poison up out of the wound. Wait a second. How would a rooster's anus cure ever catch on in the first place? I mean, it wouldn't work. Well, yeah, but if you think about it, not every rabid dog or bat bite is actually going to transfer the virus in the sense that, you know, the saliva just will fail to get the virus where it needs to be. So every so often, the healer's going to come along with his rooster's anus and, you know, put it on your wound, and sure enough, it works. Case closed, we have our rabies cure. Ah, so you're saying that Pliny's list is a lot of lucky accidents by sorcerers. Yeah, I think that lucky accidents were kind of probably what kept some of these things kicking around long enough to become accepted. What do we know about rabies? For real? I mean, what do we actually know about the disease? I mean, not much. We know it's a very unusual virus.

[C]

Yeah, the way a typical virus travels is it has a port of entry, it replicates locally, it makes it into the bloodstream, it circulates widely, it finds its target tissues, and then it replicates.

[A]

Right, exactly. So you get a wound, it gets infected, that goes into the blood.

[C]

But rabies, it enters the body at the bite wound site.

[A]

Say in Gina's case, the tip of.

[C]

Her finger, it binds to a nerve.

[A]

Right there to a particular receptor, and.

[C]

Then crawls its way up the nervous system.

[A]

One to two centimeters per day.

[C]

I think that's right. To attack the brain, it literally grabs.

[A]

Onto the nerve and climbs up. It's like hand over hand. Might take a few days to go the length of a finger, maybe three weeks to go the length of an entire arm.

[C]

It's during that slow climb that we can administer vaccine and help the body mount an immune response.

[A]

If you give a person the vaccine before they see symptoms, while the virus is still climbing its way up to the brain, they should be okay. But once the infection has taken root in the brain, Then it's too late for vaccination. The moment you have a twitchy finger, the moment you have like the slightest little flu like symptom which will later progress into rabies. That's the moment that you know you're going to die of that disease. What does the virus do when it gets to the brain? Well, it's very much not known specifically what happens in the brain. It might start shutting parts of your brain down. In about 30% of the cases, the muscles might start to kind of get paralyzed. That's called paralytic rabies. Eventually their entire body will get paralyzed and they might just slump into a coma or more often. It's that cliche of the rabies. Death is what actually happens where people have these like, spasms of rage. There are videos online where you can see people in this state.

[C]

Yeah, YouTube.

[A]

I find them impossible to watch. People, you know, just screaming and writhing in convulsions. From the virus's perspective, it's trying to drive its host to be more aggressive so that it bites somebody else and spreads more virus. The other thing that is I find really perverse is that they will get this fear of water, a really powerful fear of water.

[C]

The human victim of rabies tries to drink, wants to drink, but then they'll.

[A]

Bring the cup to their hands and they just shake and overflow. The muscles in their throat seize up a gag reflex and they can, they can't drink water.

[C]

Yeah. You can imagine though, again, from the virus's perspective why that would be advantageous. You are trying to transmit virus through biting. So an animal who can't swallow his virus filled saliva, they're going to be.

[A]

Like a loaded gun.

[C]

Right.

[A]

And eventually, after a few days in these late stages, person might lapse into a coma, have a heart attack, there's really any number of ways they could die. That sounds awful.

[D]

And it was.

[A]

So when the official results came back and Rodney took Gina's mom and dad, Ann and John Geazi, into a room and told them, we're sorry, but she has rabies and it's definitely too late for the vaccine.

[B]

John and I both started crying. You know, is there anything that can be done? And one of the doctors said, there's nothing we can do. We can either put her in a dark room and let her die, you can take her home and let her die, and we're just, this can't be happening.

[D]

They said, what else do you got? And they said, well, we can do standard intensive care. Well, does that work? Well, no. What else do you have?

[B]

And then Dr. Willoughby said, okay, well. Well, I do have an idea. I'd like to try this I don't even know what he called it.

[A]

Okay, so the night before, while they were waiting for the test results, hoping it wasn't rabies, Rodney started calling around.

[D]

You know, I actually called the CDC asking if there was anything that was unpublished but promising.

[A]

They say no.

[D]

And then I essentially headed to the library. And what I did is I pulled, I don't know, about 20 years worth.

[A]

Of case reports, started reading.

[D]

Sounded pretty hopeless, but.

[A]

But he does notice one thing he sees mention in this one kind of obscure paper.

[D]

I read one article that said, well, this might be disorder neurotransmission, that maybe.

[A]

What'S happening in the brain during rabies is something called excitotoxicity. Excito. Excitotoxicity. Excitotoxicity. Yeah. Sounds exciting. And maybe toxic. What is it?

[C]

Well, excitotoxicity, and this is. This is tricky stuff, and it's controversial.

[A]

Yeah. This is the kind of thing that actually makes rabies researchers at conferences get into fights with each other. Here's a basic idea. You might think that a brain infection just physically destroys the brain. Yeah. But under this theory, the brain isn't physically destroyed. It's just that the neurons themselves are getting overstimulated, over excited, and then that part of the brain is disrupted and it all just kind of shuts down.

[C]

Just making it impossible for the brain to function properly. And so the sort of life sustaining functions of the brain, like breathing and.

[A]

You know, circulating blood, they stop working because the neurons that control them are just overwhelmed.

[C]

Right.

[A]

In other words, rabies doesn't destroy the brain, it disrupts the brain.

[C]

The brain itself is spared.

[A]

So it's like a software problem, not a hardware problem. Yeah, and what Rodney read is that people had died of rabies, and in the autopsy, their brains looked totally fine, entirely normal.

[D]

Moreover, the virus was gone.

[A]

You couldn't even detect the rabies virus in their brain.

[D]

Brain no longer had rabies in it.

[A]

Really? Yeah, it was like there was no weapon at the scene of the crime.

[D]

So that was my clue.

[A]

What that suggested to Rodney is that the immune system does eventually turn on.

[D]

Right.

[A]

And it kicks in and it starts fighting the disease, but it just gets there too late.

[D]

So the immune system had all the tools, but essentially this virus beats your immune system to the punch. It would kill you faster than the immune response could eradicate it because the.

[A]

Virus moves, what, more quickly than the immune system? Way faster.

[D]

And to me, it was like, well, you know, the solution there is obvious.

[A]

If you could buy Gina's immune system.

[D]

Some time, Enough time, you could clear the brain, and the brain would not be damaged.

[A]

She might survive. So what he suggests to Ann is that he put Gina into a coma.

[D]

Put her into a coma, induce a coma.

[C]

And if an anesthesiologist is controlling routine brainstem activities like breathing, circulation, then no.

[A]

Matter what the virus is actually doing inside her brain, he might be able to keep her alive long enough for.

[D]

The immune system to make a response, which would take normally about seven to 10 days.

[A]

And this is still kind of a guess.

[D]

This is entirely improvised. Yeah. And lots of things can go wrong. And when they go wrong, they typically go wrong badly.

[A]

He knows there's a huge risk that she's gonna end up being brain dead or maybe locked in.

[D]

That's worse than death, I think, in everybody's eyes.

[A]

Were you nervous about the poss? Like he said, she could end up being a vegetable, just like she'd be survived.

[B]

Not. Don't think I thought that far ahead. I thought more of, um, let's just keep her alive, get the disease out of her.

[A]

So they put Gina into a coma. Rodney figures we'll give her a week, and then we'll check to see if she has an immune response.

[B]

And once they had her hooked up with the coma, she had the pole with all the IV stuff on and the different medications and stuff.

[A]

Ann stays with Gina in the hospital room and spends her time praying and.

[B]

Calling people and asking them to pray.

[A]

She repeated this one prayer, Psalm 91, over and over again.

[B]

It talks about, you know, basically, the devil not getting ahold of you.

[A]

He is my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust. Surely he will save you from. From the fowler's snare and from the deadly pestilence.

[D]

And so we were just waiting.

[A]

He will cover you with his feathers, waiting, and under his wings you will find refuge.

[D]

It was probably the most uncomfortable feeling I've ever had in medicine.

[A]

Seven days in, they sample her spinal fluid, send it in for testing, and then they get the results which say.

[D]

Her antibody response is in and going up.

[A]

So our immune system is working.

[D]

Yeah, it was working. And in fact, we now had rabies antibody, and we had a fair amount of it, and it was in the spinal fluid, meaning it's around the brain. And so essentially, the plan worked. So we said, well, okay, let's start waking her up.

[A]

But as they're waking her up, she has a fever, and they couldn't figure.

[B]

Out what was causing the fever.

[A]

So they put her back under for another week. And then finally they start to wake her up again.

[B]

And she gradually woke up.

[D]

Her brain activity looked great, and she had nice pupils, but physically, she did not move a muscle.

[A]

They'd pinch her, they'd poke her.

[D]

She had no movement anywhere other than her pupils.

[A]

So she was responding to light.

[D]

That's it.

[A]

And this was the one thing that Rodney was most afraid of, that Gina.

[D]

Was a lock in, Essentially locked inside this box of a body. And it was the worst day of my life because it looked like she was probably going to survive, and we'd actually done worse than death.

[A]

And as Rodney drove back and forth from work, he kept repeating this one prayer.

[D]

Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a poor sinner. Son of God, have mercy on me, a poor sinner. Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a poor sinner. And then about two days later, Rodney's in the hospital.

[A]

He's looking over Gina's charts.

[D]

Yeah, just checking her exam.

[A]

And another doctor is finishing up her shift. And she comes over to Rodney, said.

[D]

Oh, did you know that she had reflexes today? And I said, no.

[A]

Rodney grabs a reflex hammer, and sure.

[D]

Enough, she had knee reflexes. Next day, her eyes started fluttering a little bit.

[A]

Within a week, she was back.

[C]

For a couple weeks after I woke up, I still have no memory.

[A]

This is Gina Giese, the first person to survive rabies without the vaccine.

[C]

My first memory was actually Thanksgiving day.

[A]

A couple weeks after she woke up.

[C]

From the coma back in 2004. I just remember being with my family and playing board games with my brothers and just them being there, and then going down to the cafeteria for dinner, having fish. I remember we had fish.

[A]

How long was she in the hospital for? About two months.

[C]

I had to learn how to stand and then to walk, to turn around, to move my toes. I was really after rabies, you know, a newborn baby who couldn't do anything, and then I had to relearn that all.

[A]

Do you remember that? Do you remember that feeling?

[C]

Yeah, I mentally. I was there, you know, mentally, I knew how to do stuff, but my body wouldn't cooperate with what I wanted it to do. And it was frustrating, and it definitely took a toll on me psychologically. You know, I'm still recovering. I'm not completely back. Stuff like balance, and I can't run normally.

[A]

She can't play volleyball anymore, but she finished high school, went to college.

[C]

I graduated with a degree in just general biology.

[A]

And now Gina is really into bats. She's a bat lover. Yeah.

[C]

If I ever go down to the zoo, you know, they always, they let me go behind and in with the bats and I can pet them and stuff. Really? Yeah, I'll feed them, I'll pet them. I've been going to bat festivals here in Wisconsin, so I have no fear of bats.

[A]

That would be the last person I would expect to go to a bat festival. Oh, this girl is a saint, that's all. She is the poster child for what became known as the Milwaukee Protocol. That's the name of Rodney's thing that he did with her. Yeah. You mean this has been tried again? This has been tried all around the world by different people and different versions of it, but it's been tried around 30 times. With what result? So everything I'm about to say forward, there's debate about every single little bit of it. But he says five survivors. Five survivors? Yeah. Out of how many people? Out of about 30 people. Which on the one hand is, that seems like a terrible, you know, percentage for a treatment for a disease. 5 out of 30. But on the other hand, this is rabies. And, you know, for all of human history, it was 0 out of 30. Is there anything about the 5 that separates them from the others? Well, this brings us to the really murky territory.

[C]

You know, rabies has been one of those just really interesting pathogens to me. The more you think you know about it, the more you don't know about it. This is Amy, Dr. Amy Gilbert. I'm a research biologist at the National Wildlife Research center here in Fort Collins.

[A]

So this gets to your question, Robert. A couple years ago, Amy actually went to study rabies in Peru with this guy. I am Sergio Recuenco, a physician by profession. Just so happens Sergio is also from Peru. I was born in Lima and he now works as an epidemiologist at the CDC. But in 2010, they traveled deep into the Amazon jungle. First from Lima, we have to travel to Tarapoto. And from Tarapoto, I mean, we're talking remote. Three hours from Jurima was to San Lorenzo, where they look. Well, they were studying bat borne diseases. And in that part of the world, people have a lot of contact with vampire bats.

[C]

So we choose two towns, Tirinacocha and Santa Marta.

[A]

So they arrive and have a pretty.

[C]

Lengthy discussion with the community leaders.

[A]

They explain what they're up to and go door to door, household to household. We visit each house and talk with one member of the family. And they'd ask, you know, have you been bit by a vampire bat? Have you had any illnesses? Then they take a blood sample and what they found is basically rabies. Front page news.

[C]

11% of the blood samples that were.

[A]

Tested, seven people out of 63 had.

[C]

What we call evidence of virus neutralizing antibodies.

[A]

They had rabies antibodies in their blood. Uh, okay. Well, you know how I mentioned that sometimes the body will mount a response to rabies, but it's just too late? Yeah. So you might see those antibodies, but only when somebody's dying. Right. And these people in Peru, they had the antibodies, but we didn't have any evidence there was any neurological disease in any of the cases. They didn't seem to have rabies. They were really very surprised. I'm sorry, why? Well, think about it. The only way they could have gotten those antibodies in their blood was by contact in some point with the virus. They'd come into contact with rabies, and yet they were fine. It was almost as if they were immune to rabies. Huh.

[C]

Well, I.

[A]

But Amy won't use that word immune.

[C]

Because the data are sort of inconclusive as to whether there was any entry into the brain.

[A]

Like they didn't know if the virus made it all the way into these people's brains. And so did they come down with full blown rabies or not? They don't know. But it's possible that these people are special. Some people even argue that there are.

[C]

Special individuals who are able to survive rabies.

[A]

And not just in Peru. Monica told me about another case, the Texas Wild Child.

[C]

The rabies case. Laboratory confirmed in a girl in Texas.

[A]

17 year old girl, a runaway. She shows up in 2009 at a hospital in Houston. She has a headache, her neck hurts, and she's really agitated. They confirmed that it was rabies, but.

[C]

She didn't receive the Milwaukee protocol or.

[A]

Any critical care measures as far as we know. They just figured she would die. But then three weeks later, this girl.

[C]

Went on, you know, to walk out of the hospital.

[A]

She just got better. No drugs, no coma, nothing on her own. Wow. And this actually brings us back to Gina. She's pretty close to normal because at the point when she arrived at the hospital to see Rodney, she actually was.

[D]

Diagnosed as having small amounts of antibody in her.

[A]

She already had antibody in her blood, like those people in Peru.

[C]

She did not have recoverable virus.

[D]

We could not isolate virus from her, which is unusual.

[C]

It does seem that she is immunologically special.

[A]

In fact, if you look at all of the people who have gotten the Milwaukee protocol and survived, they all have that profile.

[C]

Like the girl in Texas, like Precious Reynolds.

[A]

That's another girl who Got the Milwaukee protocol and survived.

[C]

They have had similar lab work come back. Those patients, you know, have. Have extraordinary lab work and extraordinary outcomes.

[A]

And so some researchers in Canada and Thailand have argued that Rodney's protocol actually had very little if nothing to do with. With Gina Gizy surviving, they would say.

[C]

She survived despite Dr. Willoughby's treatment rather than because of Dr. Willoughby's treatment.

[A]

Oh, so they're accusing him of basically pulling a rooster's anus kind of number. I don't think they would, you know, really put it that way. Exactly. They say that the Milwaukee protocol should be discontinued and that we shouldn't be wasting time and money on it.

[C]

You know, they in Bangkok are acutely aware of the fact that to do one Milwaukee protocol case, you could vaccinate, I think it was all of the kids in Bangkok, preventatively against rabies.

[A]

Tens of thousands of slum kids in Bangkok could be preventatively vaccinated against rabies. So these critics would say, you know, give people vaccines, but don't induce a coma and don't use these untested drugs that Rodney administered. And if somebody comes in with an advanced case of rabies, well, unless you have evidence that they're one of these immunologically special people, you just need to accept the fact that they're going to die. I think. No, Colin, not to do anything. I will definitely disagree. We have to do something. According to Sergio, the idea that Rodney somehow just got incredibly lucky when he was treating Gena Geezi, that's very unlikely. Gina was basically at death's door. There are some things might not be fully understanding Gina G's case, but it was obvious that if she was not giving this alternative, she might not have survived. And you could argue that if Gina's part of this immunologically special group of people who can just survive rabies without the vaccine, then how come nobody did before Rodney came along?

[D]

You know, this is really not science. This is, right now storytelling. There's something, right, but we still don't know, and we won't know until we figure out which parts work and don't work.

[A]

You know, for now, Rodney's forced to evaluate and try to improve the protocol just one patient at a time, without the funding or research that he wants. So, you know, no clinical trials, no animal models.

[D]

So we're left learning the hard way, which is an awful way to learn.

[A]

But he says you can't just give up hope. You know, in the early days of cancer treatment, they weren't having any success, but they didn't just stop.

[D]

And I've seen treatments for cancer evolve over my professional career from being 0% survival to being 85% survival.

[A]

And now he puts the success rate of his protocol at about 20%.

[D]

That's a lot better than zero.

[A]

And it could go up. Alright, might not go up. It's true. So if you're a doctor now, though, and a kid comes into the hospital, hasn't had the vaccine, has a full blown case of rabies, what do you do? Do you just throw up your hand, say, sorry, he's not going to make it? Do you check and see if maybe he's immunologically special, put him in a coma? Do you put him into a coma that you don't know is going to work? Whatever the case, you've actually got to be glad that Rodney gave Gina a shot. Because whether or not you think that he saved her life or she saved her own life, the fact is that at least now we know that rabies isn't quite the killer that we once thought it was. He took it off of its throne of death, even if, you know, just a little bit, maybe.

[C]

And when we say, you know, rabies is coming off, it's 100% throne, it's, you know, down to 99.999, you know, like it's.

[A]

And it might be that it was never quite on that throne.

[C]

Exactly.

[A]

Ever.

[C]

Right.

[A]

All right, well, we've certainly cleared things up. Thank you, Tim. Yeah, thank you. Sure thing. Thanks also to Ashvin Shaw for research help and to you guys for listening.

[C]

Hi, this is Claire calling from Beijing. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about [e-mail].