Ep. 137: The Wildest RABIES Story You've Ever Heard

A 76-year-old Michigan man finally receives the kidney transplant that could free him from years of dialysis. Just over a month later, he develops tremors, confusion, difficulty swallowing, and one of the strangest symptoms in medicine: hydrophobia.

The diagnosis is rabies.

But he had no known contact with a wild animal.

In this episode, we follow investigators as they trace the virus backward through the American transplant system to a donor in rural Idaho, an aggressive skunk, and a tiny rescue kitten. What they uncover becomes one of the rarest documented cases of human-to-human rabies transmission in American history.

This is the unbelievable true story of how a life-saving kidney carried one of the deadliest viruses on Earth—and how the investigation may have prevented three more deaths.

Nature is random and chaotic.

 

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