According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States an experimental rabies treatment that saved the life of a Wisconsin teenager in 2004 has failed to help other children infected with the deadly virus.
The rabies-therapy called the Wisconsin Protocol was first tried in 2004 when 15 year old Jeanna Giese was admitted to hospital with a range of unusual symptoms which doctors took six days to understand why she was ill.
Giese had among other things blurred vision, limb tremors, and slurred speech; a month before she had been bitten by a bat.
Doctors immediately used drugs to induce a coma, used a ventilator to keep her breathing and gave her the antiviral drug ribavirin.
Giese survived, made a full recovery and became the first known victim to do so who had not received a rabies vaccination.
The Wisconsin protocol rabies-therapy protocol has however failed three other youngsters, according to the CDC.
A 10-year-old Indiana girl in Indiana developed symptoms starting with pain in her arm and it was days before her mother remembered that the girl had reported having been bitten by a bat that flew into her window the previous June.
The CDC says the rabies strain identified from her system was a variant associated with the silver-haired bat, Lasionycteris noctivagans.
In the second fatal case, an 11-year-old boy , a recent immigrant from the Philippines had apparently been bitten by a rabid dog in the Philippines, maybe two years before.
The rabies gene sequences isolated from the boy were "similar to those of a canine rabies virus variant from the Philippines says the CDC.