RedHanded - ShortHand: Rabies

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

A deadly virus that causes hydrophobia, frothing at the mouth and delirious aggression might sound more like science fiction than real life. But that’s what awaited 15-year-old Jeanna Giese when she was bitten by a rabid bat in 2004. This is the history of one of the oldest and most deadly viruses known to man – and how a 15-year-old girl and her doctor managed to overcome it, against all odds. This is the ShortHand.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Hello. Hello. Welcome to Shorthand. Another disease. I do just love diseases and much like my shark fan girl episode. I wouldn't say I'm a fan of rabies, but I would say I'm rabid for rabies. Rabid for rabies. Rabid for rabies. There you get on. Fucking obsessed with rabies. It's very, very interesting.

It's because it's terrifying. It's because it's absolutely terrifying. And obviously, you know, I was born in India, spent a lot of time there, went back every summer, and my grandmother would always be like, this before I knew what rabies was, my grandmother would always be like, do not go near those dogs on the street because if they bite you,

you will basically turn into a dog, you will start barking, you will start frothing at the mouth, you will go crazy and we'll have to put you down. Or we'll have to drag you to the doctor and have 26 injections around your navel. Yep. And I was just like, oh, grandma.

And then I found out, she wasn't fucking kidding. No, she was not. And then I was scared. And obviously, have traveled a lot. I wouldn't say I'm a hypochondri at all, but scared of rabies. Yeah, I think I've only ever had the jab once before I moved to Costa Rica.

And it was really expensive and I didn't have any money at the time. And I remember complaining, it was like 300 quid or something. Yeah, yeah. And talk to my mum about it. I was like, you know, like, it just only, even if you get the vaccination, it only gives you 24 hours. So like, what's the point? And mum was like, Hannah, if modern medicine can only get you 24 hours leeway. think how horrific the disease must be.

Yeah. So I did get it. It's not worth fucking about. It's really not worth fucking about with that. No. And Mabel had her rabies vaccination on Tuesday. Wonderful. Yeah.

Wonderful. So we're all here rabid for rabies with no one's rabid. So that is great news. The concept of a deadly virus that causes hydrophobia, frothing at the mouth and delirious aggression in its hosts, and is transmitted via biting, sounds more like the plot of a blockbuster film, than real life. And yet, every year, almost 60,000 people die strapped to a bed in the dark,

unable to stand the sight of light or water. That is so sad. I hate that so much. I just find it so interesting that a disease can make you afraid of something. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. There's that parasite that lives in mice that makes them not afraid of cats. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What? I know. Let's not think about it too much. Let's just keep going. I'm not equipped to deal with this. No, and if you do happen to be one of those 60,000 people strapped to a bed, your mind will be oscillating between panic, understanding, and then uncontrolled feral aggression.

That is the fate of almost every person who has ever shown the symptoms of rabies. And I also hate that they are oscillating, like you said, between some level of understanding, like knowing what is happening to them. Just that fact that they are lucid. at any point during that is just makes the whole thing even worse. And actually, despite hundreds of thousands of recorded cases in the past two decades alone, fewer than 100 unvaccinated people have ever successfully recovered from the rabies virus. The first person ever to survive symptomatic rabies was a 15-year-old girl in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2004.

2004. I know. What? I know. And that girl's recovery was nothing short of a miracle. This is the shorthand. So in September 2004, Gina Giesie went to church with her parents, as they did every Sunday.

During the service, however, something unusual happened. A bat flew into the church and began swooping over the congregation. It dived closer and closer to the heads of the watching crowd, getting increasingly aggressive. And understandably, it caused a bit of a stir until one quick-thinking churchgoer gave the bat a swift mid-air wallop with their hat and sent it tumbling to the ground.

Now, 15-year-old Gina, who'd been watching on, felt bad for the little creature. As an animal lover, she thought that the bat was probably scared and confused and just needed to be let outside. In reality, outside in the bright sunlight was the last place that the bat wanted to be. That's why it had avoided going

out of any of the open windows in the church in the first place. But not knowing that, kind-hearted Gina picked up the bat and walked outside. I remember when I was winging about having to get the rabies vaccine, talking to someone who'd spent time in Central America. And I was like, well, what if I just don't go near any dogs and they were like, it's not the dogs, it's the bats? Yeah, yeah, no, no, no.

And even like when we were walking around that bloody monkey extra-paganza... Oh my fuck, I forgot about that. I was just like, one of these fuckers, scratches us. Yeah. We're dead. Dead. Dead. And I did not have a vaccine before we went to that.

No, my own will have run out. Yeah. Fuck. But we made it. We did. Hopefully. So yes, Gina takes the bat outside. And just as she was about to put it down under the shade of a nearby tree,

the bat bit her, clamping down so hard that Gina had to shake her hand to get it off. Still, the little bat left nothing more than a small pinprick. on her left index finger, which Gina's mum washed when they got home. As he probably guessed, Gina had been infected with rabies, one of the oldest and deadliest viral diseases on the planet. This is going to blow your tiny mind.

The first recorded mention of rabies was written in what is now Iraq in 1930, B.C.E. Stop it. I hate it. So this written mention of rabies is actually a warning. Basically, it says it warns owners of dogs displaying rabid symptoms to take preventative measures against dog bites and warns them that if their dog causes a person's death through rabies, the owner would be heavily fined, which seems fair. People have been taking rabies pretty seriously at least for the last 4,000 years. and probably much longer than that. And as you can already tell from the symptoms we mentioned at the top of the show,

rabies has been the inspiration behind zombie-esque myths and legends for about as long as humans have known about it. And the likenesses between rabies and classic virus-style zombie films don't just end with a bit of angry biting. The way rabies infects and enters a body is quite sci-fi as well. rabies enters the body of its host through the saliva of its last one. Once a bite has pierced the skin, the virus will quickly settle itself into the muscle tissue around the puncture wound and then live in the cells. Because the virus is inside the cells and not bobbing around in the bloodstream, it's essentially undetectable to the immune system.

Sneaky. Sneaky rabies. So there, in the host cells, it waits and inked. incubates, growing stronger, slowly infecting more and more cells. This process of incubation can last for between a few days to around three months. Though, and this is important and terrifying to state, incubation periods of up to 19 years have been recorded. Maybe we didn't make it out of probably on the time. I was going to say, I didn't want to spoil it when he said it, but I was like, I hope so, because we still got time.

Jesus. Got 18 years to go. But no, that is, to be fair, like extreme examples, and they are very rare. Typically, within three months, if you haven't sort of succumb to becoming rabbit, then you're probably okay. So once the virus has then duplicated enough virons, which are individual viral proteins, it then travels through the central nervous system towards the host's brain. At this point, an infected individual will begin.

to show the first signs of rabies, and already, at this point, has around a 99% chance of death. As the virus travels towards the brain, the host may begin to feel a tingling sensation within the affected nerves. And once the virus hits the brain, all hell breaks loose.

A variety of symptoms will begin to show almost immediately. These include delirium, aggression, insomnia, paranoia, a fear of light, and most notably hydrophobia, the fear of water. For the virus, this fear of water serves the practical purpose of not allowing victims to swallow excess saliva. So if you go on to bite anyone, the chances of infection are higher. So you're even scared of the water in your own mouth?

Yep. And that terrible fate is what Gina was facing, when, a month after she was bitten, she began to feel a tingling sensation in her left arm. A few days later, she began to develop flu-like symptoms, and her mum took her to a local doctor for some blood tests. A few days later, while they waited for the test results to come back, Gina was competing in a volleyball competition,

and she began to see double. She was rushed back to the doctor, but they couldn't find anything in her blood tests that suggested any viral or bacterial infection, because that's not where rabies lives. And it was then that Gina's mum offhandedly mentioned that her daughter had been bitten by a bat the month before. And Gina's mum remembers watching the family doctor's face go white

as he suddenly realised that the 15-year-old Gina had rabies. Gina was rushed to the children's hospital of Milwaukee and put under the care of someone called Dr Rodney Willoughby. Who's the MVP, I'm going to say. Oh, yeah. So much time for Rodney. So by this point, Gina had been given just hours to live. Delirium and confusion were setting in, and it wouldn't be long before the aggressive biting and salivation started.

Given that no one in recorded history had ever recovered from symptomatic rabies at that point before, the conventional wisdom was to just strap Gina to a bed in the dark and try and administer palliative care until nature took its course. So miserable. Isn't her? She's 15 years. old. And all she did was try to help a little bat. But Dr. Willoughby was not ready to give up on Gina just yet. He began pouring over every article, every paper and even every internet post that suggested a potential cure for rabies. By his own admission, Willoughby refused to even

read the advice given by doctors who'd followed the conventional methods. He figured that since their advice had led to the death of every single rabies patient ever, why bother? Eventually, after a few hours of frantic searching, will it be found a paper online that made an interesting point? And this is so fascinating. Basically, this paper said that despite the fact that the brain of a rabies patient was infected, it never appeared to be damaged by the virus, even after death. So the paper reasoned that the virus simply used the brain as a sort of base of operations from which to cause the symptoms that eventually kill the host. So from this single article, over the course of just half an hour, Dr Willoughby created a plan,

which he then put forward to Gina's parents. The idea was to put Gina into a deep coma, so deep that her brain would no longer be able to send instructions to the rest of her body. In theory, this would incapacitate the virus's ability to cause the symptoms and potentially give Gina's body the time it needed to fight the virus off. This was just a theory It had never been done before and the risks were incredibly high Though you would feel like if you're saying she's got a 100% chance of death

We might as well try I mean you would wouldn't you And the type of coma that Dr Rodney was suggesting Normally is only brought on for a couple of hours But Gina would need to be under for over a week For her body to develop the antibodies that it needed Dr Willoughby knew that even if Gina's body could fight off

the rabies. There was a good chance that recovery from the coma would be just as difficult, but as Saru said, the other option is 100% death. And Gina's parents felt the same, they felt like they had nothing to lose. And at the very least, they thought they might make some valuable progress for other families who were affected by a rabies bite. So, Gina's parents gave Dr. Willoughby permission to put their 15-year-old daughter into a coma so deep she was basically dead. Still, better than definitely dead. For the next week, all anyone could do was load Gina's body up with antiviral drugs

and hope that she didn't stop breathing. Which still sounds better than being tied to a bed until you die in the dark. Yeah. So after about a week, Gina's body started to show signs that it was fighting the virus. And after 10 days, unbelievably, Gina was rabies free.

Her body had successfully fought off the most deadly disease known man, but there was still no guarantee that she would wake up. When Dr. Willoughby brought Gina out of the coma, his heart sank. Gina was showing absolutely no signs of bodily function. He thought he had either put her into a vegetative state, or even worse, trapped her working mind inside a paralyzed body. But then, a few days after being brought out of the coma, Gina opened her eyes. Dr. Willoughby didn't want to jump to. to conclusions. He wanted to make sure it wasn't just some sort of muscle spasm. So he brought in Gina's mum and asked her to remove her surgical mask. And he watched on in relief as Gina's eyes

slowly tracked her mum across the room. Gina was back, but she was far from out of the woods. When Gina first left hospital, in front of the world's press, her motor skills were all over the place and she was struggling to talk. Slowly but surely though, she did begin to recover. At first, Gina could only crawl and then she took her first steps and then with the help of physiotherapy she learned to walk again and after a few long years she was even able to ride a horse

in the documentary we watched in preparation for this episode Gina is still struggling to speak but it was only a couple of years after her miraculous survival however what's amazing is that since that documentary Gina has continued to recover She's now got two kids of her own and racist sled dogs for fun and her speech has now completely returned.

She now lives as the first person in recorded human history to recover from symptomatic rabies. And you might be thinking, hooray, fantastic, a cure for rabies. However, as we mentioned at the start of the show, less than 100 people have survived since. And why is that?

Saruti's going to tell you. Okay. So first and foremost, the overwhelming majority of rabies cases happen in Africa and Asia, specifically in poorer communities where the general population cannot afford to be vaccinated. And while the vaccine doesn't prevent infection, it does give you more time to get help. But if these people can't afford to be vaccinated,

they definitely can't afford to be put into a medically induced coma for a week and loaded up with antivirals. So the flip side of this is that rabies cases in countries where the victim is able to afford to be put into a coma for a week are much less likely to be symptomatic. That's because the victim is much more likely to have been given the vaccine before symptoms started to develop. On top of this, you can see in the documentary

that we used in our research, the girl who survived rabies, not everyone who's put into a coma develops a strong enough immune response, and they are still overwhelmed by the virus. This has led to a debate in the medical community about whether Gina had a particularly strong immune response or was just infected by a particularly weak form of rabies. And the reality is we'll never know because a sample of her infection was never kept.

But given how hard Gina's work to fully recover, it's safe to say, I think, that her incredibly strong will to survive must have played a part. So now we've made you all feel probably quite itchy and horrible. Let's talk about what we can do to avoid getting rabies ourselves. The bad news is that unlike smallpox, we cannot eradicate rabies. Rabies is not specific to humans or even just mammals. It can be hosted in pretty much any animal with a vertebrae,

although some animals like birds are asymptomatic and therefore are unlikely to pass the virus on. The majority of human cases worldwide are inflicted by rabid dogs, and packs of stray dogs are much more prevalent in Africa and in Asia. That being said, the majority of cases in North America do come from bats. Some good news is that, as we have been talking about, there is a rabies vaccine. And even better news is if the vaccine and a course of human rabies antibodies is administered to a bite victim, and if symptoms have not started yet, the odds of survival are almost 100%. In fact, if the antibodies are administered within the first 24 hours of infection,

the odds actually are 100%. You can receive the rabies vaccine preventatively, obviously, without having been bitten. and that drastically reduces your chances of developing symptomatic rabies, although you do still need to receive the vaccine after a bite, even if you've had it already. Very, very important. Don't think you're safe just because you had the vaccine. It just gives you, what, 24 hours extra?

That's what I believe. Believe is that it gives you an extra 24 hours grace to get to a hospital. It might be a bit longer, but they'll probably tell you that to get your fucking ass to hospital. Yeah. So this brings us nicely to our singular top tip to avoid developing. symptomatic rabies. And I have to say this is the simplest top tip we've ever given. And listen up because it will help you prevent yourself from dying a very unfun death. Get vaccinated. Get your dog vaccinated. Get your cat vaccinated. If you have a bat, I don't know, do they do bat vaccines? Get your bat vaccinated and don't have a bat. That's

fucking weird. Get preventatively vaccinated if you can afford it. Or if you are going to Going to a country where rabies is prevalent, get vaccinated again within 24 hours of any bite from an animal that you believe could be rabid. In fact, even if you don't know if it's rabid or you think you're sure it's not rabid, go get vaccinated anyway. Technist rabies, that's what you need. Exactly. Just don't penny pinch there if you can afford it. It's really, really fucking not worth it. So in North America, because we're not just talking about the rest of the developing world.

We're talking about the West as well. in the West if you get bitten by like some sort of stray dog or like get a bite from a bat, again, go get vaccinated. Even if you're sure that that dog wasn't rabid, get treated anyway. And if your child wakes up to find a bat in their room and you can't confirm whether your child has been bitten, get them vaccinated because like we said, Gina's bite looked like a tiny little pinprick. The kid might not even know if they've been bitten. Now in the UK, rabies is exceptionally rare, effectively non-existent.

but there have been cases of travellers returning home and developing symptomatic rabies and a few even rarer cases where it appears that the victim had received the bite in the UK. That being said, if you've been bitten by a stray dog, just go and get yourself checked out anyway. It's not going to do anyone any harm.

Now finally, if you're in Peru, there is actually a chance that you might just be immune to rabies. A test of 73 Peruvian people, which granted is not a very big sample size, But of those people, they found that seven of them had rabies antibodies in their system, despite only one of them ever having been vaccinated. That's so interesting. Is it in Peru as well where there's that community of people who can drink like a super acidic water

that would kill anyone else? But because they've been there for so long, they have this, like, immunity to it. Oh, that's interesting. I don't know. But there is definitely an episode of Rover Monsters. And I can't remember where it was. It was definitely somewhere in Asia or Latin America, just narrowing it down. of an indigenous group of people who can catch electric eels with their hands.

Like, I shit you not. Wow. Like, Jeremy Wade goes and watches them catch electric eels with their hands. And they're fine. They're fine. And then he puts on a full-on suit and goes and grabs them. And even though the current can't pass into his body and electrocute him, it's like the eel is shocking him and he's like vibrating.

Wow. And it's like they were completely fine. It's crazy. Go watch River Monsters. But back to this. Yes, of the 73 Peruvian people that they tested, they found that seven of them had these antibodies and only one had been vaccinated,

meaning that the other six had almost certainly been infected by rabies at some point and fought of the virus and survived or without even noticing. So in short, get vaccinated or be Peruvian. And even if you are Peruvian, maybe just get vaccinated anyway. I think it has now topped being burned alive as my least favorite way to die. Oh, God. You've got rabies, you're strapped to the bed, and then there's a fire, and you can't get out.

Fuck. That's it. That is it. That is your episode, your shorthand on rabies. Yeah, like we said, I think the most important one there is, if you have any common sense, and you are in a situation you can do so, obviously go get vaccinated. But the kid one is the one that's important because they might not tell you if they've been bitten. So even if the fact if you find a bat in your room, what if they're just like playing in the woods and something bites them? Tell your kids to tell you if they get bitten by anything.

That's a really, that's hard though. Yeah. That's hard. Well, have fun. Bye. Don't have nightmares in your rabies coma.