A CASE OF ANTIRABIES INOCULATION ENCEPHALITIS WITH A LONG CLINICAL COURSE

In 1950, a 24-year-old man developed gait disturbance, incontinence of urine and increasing lethargy a week after a course of antirabies vac cination. He was diagnosed as having post-rabies vaccination encephali tis and had been in hospital for 37 years before he died in 1987. This is one of the rare cases in which the course of this disease was trac ed for an exceptionally long period. His personality began to deterior ate at an early stage of the illness, but his intellectual faculties s eemed to be maintained rather well until a few years prior to his deat h. A neuropathological study revealed disseminated, patchy and somewhe re perivascularly located demyelinated lesions in the cerebral white m atter. Inflammatory lymphocytic infiltration was also remarkable in th e CNS regions. But while the superimposed lesions due to convulsive at tacks, traumatic contusion and terminal anoxia were remarkable, the wh ole aspect of neuropathological changes in rabies inoculation encephal itis cannot be observed.