Dead Calm: the Complete Story of Rabies Virus — From Ancient Terror to Modern Science

The rabies virus has been killing human beings for four thousand years. It appears in the oldest medical texts ever written. It may have inspired the legends of werewolves and vampires. It produces one of the most terrible deaths in the history of medicine - a progressive encephalitis in which victims become terrified of water in the same throat muscles they need to swallow it. And it kills virtually everyone it reaches once symptoms appear.It also kills approximately 59,000 people every year. Almost all of them are children. Almost all of them could have survived with a treatment that Louis Pasteur made available in 1885.Dead Calm is the complete story of the rabies virus - from the Babylonian law code of 1930 BCE that first documented the danger of a rabid dog bite, to Pasteur's extraordinary 1885 experiment on a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister, to the Milwaukee Protocol that saved a teenager named Jeanna Giese in 2004 when no one with symptomatic rabies had ever survived without prior vaccination, to the global Zero by 30 elimination programme that is racing - and struggling - to reach zero human rabies deaths by 2030.This is the story of a disease that is both ancient and modern, both solved and unsolved - solved in the wealthy countries where dog vaccination and post-exposure prophylaxis have reduced it to a handful of cases per year, and catastrophically unsolved in the poor countries where 59,000 people die annually of a disease that has been preventable for a century and a half. The science works. The politics have not kept up. The children pay the difference.From the author of Fever Country and Dark Fields.