Family says prayer helped teenage girl recover from rabies bite

Published: 2005-03-21

FOND DU LAC, Wis. (CNS) -- Fifteen-year-old Jeanna Giese, the first person to survive human rabies without receiving any vaccination, has been on the path to recovery and even returned to her Catholic high school March 14 to attend a few classes a day. Her family says their faith has given them strength through the ordeal and they also credit it with bringing about the recovery of the teenager, who was bitten by an infected bat at her parish last September and diagnosed with the disease a month later. Their faith has certainly been tested as Jeanna's parents, John and Ann, watched their lively, athletic daughter become ill -- her body ravaged by the rabies virus -- and fight to regain the physical independence most take for granted.

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