Rabies

 Here in the Philippines, about 300 people die of rabies each year. Indeed, our town just lost a young girl bitten by a street dog who didn't tell her mom about the bite.

 Sigh

ironically, the treatment of rabies by giving a vaccine during the incubation period dates back to the time of Louis Pasteur in 1885.

this works because unlike other illnesses, the period between being infected and developing the disease with rabies may be weeks or even months.

Louis Pasteur holding rabbits, which were used to help develop the vaccine for rabies. Credit: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Pasteur (building on ideas from others) figured out that if a germ was made weak, you could give it to a person or animal and they will only get a little sick, but would become immune to the disease.

But rabies back then was a horrible disease and still is fatal. So how could he make the infection weak? By injecting it cross species into rabbits. The virus would be weak, but as it was inoculated into the next rabbit, would become stronger. So make a vaccine from the first rabbit which would give the rabbit a mild rabies infection, and gradually use material from the later, stronger infected rabbits.

Then make the vaccine starting with the first rabbit specimen, and give repeated shots until the final dosage was reached. This way, you could be immune to rabies.

Pasteur was not a licensed physician and could have been prosecuted for doing so — on 6 July 1885, Pasteur used his rabies vaccine, in the presence of two local doctors, to treat 9-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been severely bitten by a neighbour’s rabid dog.

Joseph Meister received a total of 13 inoculations over a period of 11 days, and survived in good health.

But even then, there might have been a question if the vaccine worked: 

Pasteur’s reluctance might also be accounted for by posthumous analysis of his laboratory notebooks, which revealed that Pasteur had vaccinated two other individuals before Meister; one remained well but might not actually have been exposed, and the other developed rabies and died.

On the other hand, since rabies is 100 percent fatal, most people would be willing to risk a fifty fifty chance of not getting rabies.  

By the end of 1885, several more desperate rabies-exposed people had travelled to Pasteur’s laboratory to be vaccinated. During 1886, Pasteur treated 350 people with his rabies vaccine, of whom only one developed rabies. The startling success of these vaccines led directly to the founding of the first Pasteur Institute in 1888.

 

quoted from Nature

or if you really want to be frightened, listen to the audiobook: