[A case of rabies encephalitis with long survival. Clinical pathological correlations]

We present a case of a 22 year old male patient who developed a rabies encephalomyelitis with evolution of six weeks, treated first as a psychiatric disorder and later as an encephalitis. This case had the following important features; 1--A long time with the disease: usually the patients die into the first eight days after diagnosis; 2--The evident reactive gliosis; 3--Almost all the studied fields showed inclusion bodies in both supratentorial and infratentorial portions; 4--The hippocampus and spinal cord neurons had many or unique Negri bodies and some of those were giant; 5--Microglia proliferation and free acidophilus bodies. All those microscopic features mean a long evolution time that is rarely seen in this illness; in medical literature we found only ten long duration cases.