I might have been unclear: the Milwaukee protocol was not effective.
My point was, normal medical ethics seem to go out the window here. With most interventions, you can harm the patient, so you had best not give them anything until you test it.
But a symptomatic rabies patient is default dead. Given these results, it strikes me that we ought to move much faster through our usual phases and make it available for immediate use in centres which are symptomatic rabies patients.
If any of those patients start surviving, the drug has proven itself for general use and stats can be gathered. The control group is every prior symptomatic rabies patient: they all died.
The article made it sound like this will be something rolled out over several years. If that, as investment is required.
An estimated 59,000 people die of rabies each year globally. Each year of delay kills them. My question is should we not make this available immediately and see what happens?
It isn’t like heart disease where the patient will often live many years and so a new treatment must prove itself. Literally everyone dies of rabies if symptomatic.