The State of Rabies: Treating a Disease That Often Leads to Death

In the late 19th century, Louis Pasteur devised a strategy to immunize against rabies by progressively attenuating a virus by successive passage through rabbit spinal cords. The “Pasteur Treatment” involved injections of up to 25 doses of this crudely purified vaccine, three on the first day and then one per day over the next three weeks into the abdominal wall. The idea is to develop immunity — antibodies to the virus — before the virus has a chance to invade the central nervous system. Throughout his life, my father recalled the horror of the treatment — even more than that of the dog bite.
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