A WIRED story on a Milwaukee doctor’s controversial new strategy for overcoming rabies, a disease previously thought to be incurable in humans once it had infected the brain, is now available online.
Rodney Willoughby, a specialist in infectious disease at the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, came up with what’s now called the “Milwaukee Protocol” in 2004 to treat Jeanna Giese, 15, by putting her into a coma and flooding her system with antiviral drugs.
The protocol has had some limited success since Giese’s case, though other rabies experts suspect the disease actually isn’t incurable, not in 100 percent of cases, and the rare (exceedingly rare) individual is able to survive it.
