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 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.
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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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