A 12-year-old Brazilian boy infected with human rabies died from cardiac arrest, Xinhua reported. It was the fourth death caused by human rabies in Brazil in 2008. Elismar Ferreira Martins was taken to the Base Hospital in Brasilia, the Brazilian capital, on Nov. 24, days after he was bitten on the foot by a bat he was playing with. Doctors said his condition was serious, with possible brain damage, when he was taken to hospital. He was in deep coma, they said. Elismar received a treatment developed in 2004 by doctors from Milwaulkee, the United States. The treatment had also been used to treat a Brazilian teenage boy, who recovered from human rabies in November. The only four people in the world who survived human rabies were cured with the Milwaulkee treatment, which uses medically induced coma and antiviral drugs to fight the disease. Rabies is normally transmitted through animals such as dogs, monkeys or bats. The initial symptoms include fever, nausea and headaches, which later evolve to convulsion, excessive salivation and behavior changes. In the last 20 years, over 600 cases of human rabies were registered in Brazil. Most of them occurred in the northern and northeastern regions, which are considered the least developed in the country.
