This guy deserves a Darwin award to be named after him. He woke up with a bat gnawing on his neck and refused to get a rabies shot. He died of rabies.
See Milwaukee protocol. It did failed to improve outcomes after subsequent testing but they basically put you in a coma which I assume they still do out of compassionate reasons.
Rabies treatment doesn't guarantee survival, it's really a crap shoot
Rabies treatment can cost $22k out-of-pocket [1]
[1] https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20180220/the-high-c...
In a very USA way, this guy might have been forced to choose between death-by-rabies and leaving something for his descendants.
But if you leave it until symptoms start, it's pretty much a death sentence. A terrible, agonising death, too. (2)
There are also vaccines, that can be taken pre-exposure. What I did not know is that they date back to 1885 (3)
1:
> Existing vaccine regimens for rabies PEP are close to 100% effective and WHO-prequalified vaccines are highly effective. The expected number of rabies deaths in patients receiving PEP after a confirmed rabies exposure is fortunately extremely low.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X1...
2:
> As of 2016, only fourteen people had survived a rabies infection after showing symptoms. Rabies causes about 56,000 deaths worldwide per year
This is an understatement: "Rabies causes about 56,000 deaths worldwide per year. As of 2016, only fourteen people had survived a rabies infection after showing symptoms."
There’s a couple videos on YouTube detailing the process.
It’s like advanced Alzheimer’s, delirium, and water starvation in one disease, mixed with unbelievable pain.
Even if you don't give a fuck, you wouldn't choose this way to die.
Not nice, but not really worse than many other modes of death - at least superficially. We do not know what happens in the sedated brains of the patients in their last days.
That said, daytime flying, obvious sickness, and aggression/biting are all symptoms of likely rabies in bats.
> The existence of offspring, though potentially deleterious to the gene pool, does not disqualify a nominee. . . [E]ach nominee is judged based on whether or not she has removed her own genes, without consideration to the number of offspring or, in the case of an elderly winner, the likelihood of producing more offspring.