Mass Dog Vaccination Could Eliminate Rabies Globally

[Buster's Uncle]

Experts unveil plan to end rabies globally via dog vaccinations
Reuters
By Will Dunham  1 hour ago



A veterinarian prepares a dosage of rabies vaccine at the 2014 Taipei Pet Show in Taipei in this file photo taken July 11, 2014. REUTERS/Pichi Chuang/Files



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Rabies experts on Thursday unveiled a blueprint for eliminating the pernicious disease, which almost always is caused by bites from rabid dogs and kills tens of thousands of people a year worldwide, through a program of mass dog vaccinations in targeted regions.

The viral disease is rare in developed countries thanks to routine vaccination of pet dogs, but still kills about 69,000 people globally every year, mostly in poor and rural parts of Africa and Asia. About a third of rabies-related deaths are in India alone.

Vaccines for people and dogs have long existed, but rabies has persisted in the absence of a concerted effort to wipe it out. The international team of experts, writing in the journal Science, proposed what they called a cost-effective and achievable strategy for ending canine-spread rabies.

Efforts in Latin America and pilot projects in Africa and Southeast Asia have shown that mass dog vaccination programs can prevent human rabies in low-income countries as well as wealthy ones, they said. Vaccinating 70 percent of dogs in a given region is the threshold for halting rabies, they noted.

"There is now convincing evidence that vaccination of dogs would eliminate greater than 98 percent of the rabies health burden globally," said Guy Palmer, director of Washington State University's Paul G. Allen School for Global Animal Health.

"Rabies is an ancient plague. Descriptions of human suffering and death can be seen since the earliest times of recorded history. Even today, rabies is the most consistently fatal infectious disease of humans," added Palmer, noting that virtually every person who develops symptoms dies.

Felix Lankester, director of the Serengeti Health Initiative that conducts dog vaccination campaigns in rural villages around Tanzania's Serengeti National Park, said the primary focus of the international effort would be mass dog vaccination in countries where rabies is endemic.

Multiple small- to medium-sized areas would be targeted to create disease-free zones, then the size of those zones would be increased and the various zones would coalesce into a bigger disease-free region, Lankester said.

A coordinated global effort would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and perhaps several billions, Lankester estimated, and would need international health agencies, charities, governments of rabies-endemic countries and others on board.

"We know how and we have the ammunition to do it," Lankester said. "I am optimistic that it can be done. Whether the necessary political will and funding will be harnessed is another matter."

Rabies remains a threat to half the world's people and about 40 percent of victims are children, the experts said.

The virus, present in an infected animal's saliva, is transmitted to people through a deep bite. It is one of the few diseases in which a person can be protected by a vaccine after being exposed.

Its incubation period is usually one to three months. As the virus spreads through the central nervous system, fatal inflammation of the brain and spinal cord occurs.

(Reporting by Will Dunham, editing by G Crosse)


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[Buster's Uncle]

Mass Dog Vaccination Could Eliminate Rabies Globally
LiveScience.com
By Rachael Rettner, Senior Writer  2 hours ago



Wolves transitioned into dogs — right down to the floppy ears and wagging tails — as they adapted to ever closer relationships with humans



It is possible to eliminate cases of the deadly rabies virus in people worldwide through mass vaccinations of dogs, some researchers argue.

Rabies cases are extremely rare in developed countries — in the United States, there was just one rabies case in 2013, and the patient acquired the disease while in Guatemala, according to researchers from Washington State University. Effective rabies vaccines have been available for years, but the virus still kills more than 69,000 people yearly worldwide, most of them children in Africa and Asia.

The rabies vaccine can be given to people after a possible exposure to the virus, and is extremely effective in preventing the disease from taking hold. But once a person begins to show symptoms of rabies — which can include delirium, abnormal behavior, hallucinations and partial paralysis — the disease is almost always fatal.

"The irony is that rabies is 100 percent preventable. People shouldn't be dying at all," said Dr. Guy Palmer, a veterinary infectious disease expert at Washington State University's Allen School for Global Animal Health.

In an article published today (Sept. 25) in the journal Science, Palmer and his colleagues argue that eliminating rabies cases is possible if doctors, veterinarians and public health professionals work together to establish mass vaccination programs for dogs.

Although rabies can infect many different animals, studies show that domestic dogs, rather than wildlife, are the main source of rabies infections in people, the researchers said.

In his article, Palmer pointed to a 2009 study that found that vaccinating 70 percent of dogs in villages in the East African country of Tanzania was enough to break the chain of rabies transmission from dogs to people, and eventually eliminate the disease in those areas.

Since a mass dog vaccination program began in Tanzania in 2003, the number of deaths from rabies droped from 50 a year to almost zero, the researchers said.

Studies also show that vaccinating 70 percent of dogs in an area is cost-effective, and less expensive over the long term than providing vaccinations to bite victims, the researchers said.

In many countries, progress toward eliminating rabies is "hampered by lack of political commitment and financing," the researchers wrote. Support from international human and animal health organizations could play an important role in scaling up pilot dog vaccination programs to the national level, they said.

"Caine rabies elimination meets all the criteria for a global health priority: It is epidemiologically and logistically feasible, cost effective, and socially equitable," they wrote.

The vision of Louis Pasteur, who invented the first rabies vaccination in 1885 and wanted to rid the world of the disease, "is within our reach," the researchers said.


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