Rabies survivor, doctors adjust to spotlight's glare.

Byline: Mark Johnson and Kawanza Newson

MILWAUKEE _ Rabies had almost killed Jeanna Giese; now it threatened to define her. After months in the hospital, the quiet high school athlete who shunned attention returned home to find herself a subject of local curiosity and international scientific debate.

Had a miracle made her the first human to survive the virus without vaccine? Had her salvation come from the drugs that dripped through her IV, or from the coma the doctors placed her in? Or had she simply been fortunate in getting rabies from a bat instead of a dog?

While scientists struggled to explain her remarkable survival, Jeanna spent her Sweet 16 summer learning to ride a bicycle again. She roared down roller coasters at Disney World. She swam with dolphins.

And for many hours, she sat at the kitchen table in Fond du Lac, Wis., catching up on schoolwork missed during the months she lay in Children's Hospital of Wisconsin.

In the fall, roughly a year after rabies entered her body and began creeping toward her brain, Jeanna rejoined her junior class. She took driving lessons with her mother in the family SUV and even rode atop one of the floats at homecoming, the event she had been too sick to attend a year ago.

This was the teenage life for which Jeanna longed. A life off-camera.

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Her desire for privacy was understandable. Cameras had followed her on New Year's Day as she left the hospital in a wheelchair. They tracked her in February as she pushed a walker into the high school gym to watch her old basketball team. At her birthday party in June, the cameras bunched together waiting to catch a glimpse of her descending a stairway unaided. Quietly, she chose a different set of stairs.

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Now, just when life was returning to normal, there loomed another date in front of the cameras.

In October, 250 scientists, doctors and other rabies experts from around the globe were gathering in Ottawa, Ontario, for the 16th International Conference on Rabies in the Americas.

Highlighting the event: appearances by Jeanna and her doctor, Rodney Willoughby Jr. A film crew from the British Broadcasting Corporation would be there shooting a documentary on the world's first unvaccinated rabies survivor.

"I would say that it's certainly one of the premier presentations of the meeting, and it's still, of course, rather controversial as to why she survived," said conference chairwoman Susan Nadin-Davis, of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

No one was more aware of the…