The documented number of people who have survived a full blown rabies infection can be counted on one hand. I only know of 1 person, there may be others.
Another interesting question is: how many people get infected, then recover, but never develop the symptoms? Do they exist? Could it even be common? On that question, the chances of developing symptoms after a confirmed rabid bite are estimated to be between 15% and 60%. What exactly happens to other 40%? Does the virus fails to get hold and multiply? Or on the contrary it's not stealthy enough and triggers the immune response that defeats it? Or it starts to spread and then stops for some other reason? And whatever happens, what exactly determines it: truly random chance, or genes of the infected person or variant of the virus or type of the bite?
Currently we identify rabies with the terminal stage of the disease and the only reliable test is posthumous, so no wonder it's 100% deadly. While it's indeed extremely deadly it's still a curious question of how much exactly this "extremely" means: 60% or 99.99% or 100%.
Probably this will never be studied, because the humane way is to conduct none of that research and just vaccinate every suspected person within reach. Plus where possible try to eradicate infection reservoirs like the did in the Alps in 1970s. These 20000 people in India could've lived, it's a shame really.
It appears so [1]: “New research has shown that humans may be able to survive Rabies without vaccination or treatment after all. A study done in Peru (were Vampire Bats, a known Rabies carrier, are common) lead by Amy Gilbert of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 7 out of the 63 people evaluated tested positive for rabies antibodies. Of those seven people only one had previously taken the Rabies vaccine. This meant that the other six had produced antibodies on their own after being exposed to the virus and had survived.”
[1] https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/viruses101/is_rabies_re...
Certainly not. I'd have said almost certainly had this been a civilian. But the fact that it was an on-duty Marine gives this a 0% chance of not being reported.
Then they wouldn't have developed rabies. There was no Marine who got rabies at Quantico from a raccoon in the 80s who recovered.
- "We know that we had a neurological disease that was probably caused by a virus," Bernard said, adding that the lack of a positive lab test made it "highly unlikely" that the Marine had rabies."
- "Throughout his illness, he had a disease compatible with rabies," he said. "We don't know what it is so we can't say what it isn't until we know what it is."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1983/06/02/susp...
Rabies is not established in the raccoon populations of California, Oregon, or Washington so the only rabid raccoons you might find are ones that recently got it from a bat or (in California) a skunk.
In California that works out to around 4 rabid raccoons found every 20 years or so. In Oregon no rabid raccoons have been documented in at least 50 years. In Washington no rabid raccoons have ever been documented.