Airborne Rabies Transmission in a Laboratory Worker

A 56-year-old man died of rabies 21 days after exposure to a "fixed" strain of rabies virus. Rabies virus was recovered from the brain by cultural techniques and demonstrated in neural tissue by electron microscopy. Infection apparently resulted from inhalation of an aerosol generated in a biological laboratory during the manufacture of animal rabies vaccine. The victim had received preexposure vaccination against rabies 13 years earlier but had not developed demonstrable serum antibodies.