Baby Born To Mother With Fatal Rabies Survives Without Infection.

This April in the Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases, Chinese doctors reported an extremely rare case of rabies — one that ended with a remarkable, if bitter-sweet, story of survival. In May 2013, a 25-year-old woman living in a rural region of the Henan Province was bitten by a dog she didn’t know was rabid while she was four months pregnant. Although the bite was quickly treated by her local village clinic, the woman never received the vaccine needed to prevent rabies and eventually developed symptoms right as she entered labor. Two days after she successfully delivered her child via cesarean section, she died from the viral disease. Somehow though, her newborn son made it through without having caught the infection, as did her husband. The doctors couldn’t be certain how the baby escaped transmission, but they theorized that the mother’s placenta may have played a protective role. Though there was ample opportunity for the virus to spread to the child during her final moments of labor, it’s possible it hadn’t spread widely enough throughout the mother’s bloodstream for that to happen. The son and husband were also given a preventative rabies shot following her death, another possible factor. In China, it’s thought that dogs attack hundreds of pregnant women annually. And while most receive a rabies shot afterwards, the vaccine is oftentimes too expensive a precaution for those living in less developed areas. Indeed, it’s the poorest people who make up the majority of deaths caused by rabies; a toll that reaches in the tens of thousands globally every year. According to the authors, there have only been six other documented cases of a pregnant woman with full blown rabies delivering a baby, with five out of six newborns surviving. As with the current case, the mothers themselves weren’t so lucky. However rare they are, preventing these needless tragedies will require the same sort of dedicated public health measures seen elsewhere, like widespread dog vaccinations and monitoring centers in areas where rabies is known to exist, the authors wrote. Previous successful experiences suggest that it is possible to fight the disease by means of virus control and prevention. Source: Qu Z-Y, Li G-W, Chen Q-C, et al. Survival of a newborn from a pregnant woman with rabies infection. BMC Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases. 2016.