How to eradicate canine rabies in 10 years or less

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2007:

 

 

Editorial feature:

 

How to eradicate canine rabies in 10 years or less

 

 

" Rabies could be gone in a decade, " BBC

News headlined worldwide on September 8, 2007.

" Rabies could be wiped out across the world, "

the BBC report continued, " if sufficient

vaccinations are carried out on domestic dogs,

according to experts. "

BBC News went on to quote staff of the

Royal Dick Veterinary School at Edinburgh

University in Scotland, who were among the

cofounders of the Alliance for Rabies Control and

promoters of the first World Rabies Day, held on

September 7, 2007.

None of the Alliance for Rabies Control

spokespersons appear to have actually set any

sort of timetable for possibly eradicating

rabies, but no matter. Experts have recognized

for decades that rabies is wholly eradicable from

all species except bats through targeted mass

immunization--and the chief obstacle to

eradicating bat rabies is that no one has

developed an aerosolized vaccine that could be

sprayed into otherwise inaccessible caves and

tree trunks. Inventing such a vaccine is

considered difficult but possible.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control rabies

program chief Charles Rupprecht on World Rabies

Day formally pronounced the U.S. free of canine

rabies, but similar informal proclamations have

been issued for years.

" The tools for effective rabies control

are available. What is lacking is the

motivation, commitment and resources to tackle

the disease effectively, " the Alliance for

Rabies Control declared. " Mass vaccination of

the domestic dog provides the most cost-effective

and efficient strategy for controlling canine

rabies and hence transmission from dogs to

humans, " the Alliance elaborated. " Lacking are

the delivery systems, public education campaigns

and resources to apply these technologies in the

developing world. "

Asserting that rabies kills 100 children

per day, worldwide, the Alliance for Rabies

Control acknowledged that " Rabies is also a

concern for animal welfare, as fear of the

disease results in hostile and antagonistic

attitudes towards dogs and often inhumane

approaches to dealing with suspected rabid dogs

by communities. "

The Alliance for Rabies Control

emphasizes the need to expand dog vaccination

against rabies in Asia and Africa.

" In Asia and Africa, " the Alliance for

Rabies Control points out, " the domestic dog is

the main reservoir for rabies. As rabies is

generally maintained only in a single reservoir

population in any given area, control of disease

in this population will result in its

disappearance from all other species. This has

been demonstrated with the elimination of rabies

following oral vaccination of foxes in western

Europe, where red foxes are the reservoir host.

Results from research projects in eastern Africa

show that mass vaccination of domestic dogs has

the same result, even in areas such as the

Serengeti ecosystem, which comprise a wide

diversity of wildlife species. When sufficient

domestic dogs are vaccinated, rabies also

declines in wildlife, and human exposures to the

rabies virus are significantly reduced. "

" In areas where there is a high

prevalence of rabies, such as Africa and Asia, "

the Alliance for Rabies Control added, " the need

for vaccination has often been overlooked,

despite the fact this would cost less than other

health care programs, " including administering

post-exposure rabies immunization to save dog

bite victims.

The Alliance for Rabies Control strongly

favors post-exposure immunization, as well as

prophylactic vaccination, but points out that

post-exposure immunization is not a rabies

suppression strategy, because it does not

neutralize the host reservoir.

Subsidized post-exposure vaccination is

the standard response to rabies in India, China,

and much of Africa. Post-exposure vaccination

saves thousands of lives annually, despite

many failures when dog bite victims fail to seek

treatment soon enough, do not complete the full

course of injections, or receive fake, expired,

or obsolescent vaccines, a problem particularly

prevalent in parts of India and China, where

post-exposure vaccines are often made by local

suppliers, using formulas elsewhere long

abandoned.

While post-exposure vaccination is

essential, and should continue, with

improvement to achieve consistently positive

results, progress toward eliminating rabies has

been markedly faster in nations that have

emphasized preventively vaccinating dogs.

Argentinian medical doctor Oscar Larghi

demonstrated during the mid-1990s, for example,

that inexpensive three-month dog vaccination

drives could succeed in even the largest and

poorest shanty-towns. Larghi also demonstrated

that while reducing the street dog population may

be of some value in reducing the numbers of dogs

to be vaccinated, dog population reduction is

not otherwise a significant or essential part of

an effective rabies control strategy.

Reported Larghi to the members of the

International Society for Infectious Diseases in

May 1998, " Control of rabies in developing

countries can be very successful if based on

appropriate planning, health education of human

populations, 70% vaccine coverage of dog

populations, and epidemiological surveillance.

These parameters, with little emphasis in dog

population reduction (less than 10% of the

estimated population), were applied in the

metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, Argentina

(10.5 million inhabitants), Lima-Callao, Peru

(6.5 million inhabitants), and Sao Paulo, Brazil

(14 million inhabitants). Dog rabies cases were

reduced to zero, from close to 5,000 cases per

year in Buenos Aires, 1,000 in Lima, and 1,200

in Sao Paulo. "

In each city, the rabies control teams

impounded and euthanized only dogs who appeared

to be already rabid, aggressive, or otherwise

severely unhealthy.

The preventive vaccination approach also

works in wildlife. Anne Arundel County,

Maryland, for example, had 97 cases of animal

rabies in 1997, when county officials began

experimentally distributing oral rabies vaccine

pellets to immunize raccoons. Gradually

expanding the program, the county had just 10

animal rabies cases in 2006.

An attempt begun a year earlier to

eradicate coyote rabies in Texas, by

air-dropping vaccine bait pellets, achieved a

98% reduction of canine rabies in all species by

1998.

As long ago as 1973, William Winkler,

M.D., of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control

and Prevention, warned in the National Academy

of Sciences' handbook Control of Rabies, that

" Persistent trapping or poisoning campaigns as a

means to rabies control should be abolished.

There is no evidence, " Winkler wrote, " that

these costly and politically attractive programs

reduce either wildlife reservoirs or rabies

incidence. " Similar language has appeared ever

since in the Compendium of Animal Rabies

Prevention & Control, an annual publication of

the National Association of State Public Health

Veterinarians.

Good examples and bad

Agriculture and Rural Development

director Ferreira da Conceição of Lunada

province, Angola, took the necessary approach

in August 2007, directing a three-week drive

that vaccinated 63,544 dogs, cats, monkeys,

livestock, and work animals.

But a more discouraging example emerged

in Addis Ababa, the national capital of

Ethiopia, just a month after the Homeless Animal

Protection Society of Ethiopia seemed to be

making headway toward establishing a high-volume

dog sterilization and vaccination program after

seven years of struggle. As with other

sterilization and vaccination programs around the

world, the vaccination component would be the

essential element in rabies preventation.

Sterilization would stabilize the dog population

to prevent the other complaints about dogs'

presence and behavior that so often causes public

officials to seize upon even the vaguest hint of

a rabies outbreak as an excuse to kill dogs.

As the July/August 2007 edition of ANIMAL

PEOPLE recounted, HAPS in June 2007 rescued four

street dogs from a 70-year-old gun emplacement

where they had been dumped to die, British

songwriter Maria Daines' recording One Small Dog,

written in appreciation of the rescue and titled

in honor of the bravest dog, on August 2, 2007

reached the #1 position on the Soundclick pop

rock chart.

Daines donated all proceedings from her

surprise hit to HAPS, but HAPS cofounders Hana

Kifle and Efrem Legese had little to celebrate.

HAPS had won a contract from the Addis

Ababa government to sterilize and vaccinate

street dogs. The contract enabled them to

operate a clinic, but the contract was unfunded.

As a little-known charity in a remote location,

HAPS had difficulty attracting the support

required to treat the half million dogs in Addis

Ababa who must be sterilized and vaccinated to

reach the 70% target necessary to stabilize the

dog population and prevent rabies from spreading

among them.

Revoking the contract, and HAPS'

authorization to run the clinic, Addis Ababa

officials announced that they would use

strychnine to poison as many dogs as possible to

try to eradicate rabies before the mid-September

celebration of the Coptic millennium.

Thereby, the officials demonstrated that

they had learned little more about rabies

control, animal population management, and

urban sanitation than might have been known to

the Queen of Sheba, who reputedly lived near

Addis Ababa about 3,000 years ago.

Poisoning street dogs had already been

introduced as long as 2,000 years earlier in

Egypt-and poisoning campaigns that caused dog

populations to briefly crash might have

contributed to the conditions that drew African

desert cats into Egyptian cities to hunt rats and

mice. Those cats became the progenitors of

today's domestic house cats and feral cats.

Under pressure of medieval cat purges, domestic

and feral cats approximately quadrupled their

fecundity: the mummified remains of early

Egyptian cats reveal that they had only two

kittens per litter and one litter per year, like

African desert cats, but modern house cats and

feral cats often have litters of four or more

kittens, and raise two litters per year if

conditions permit.

Public policymakers have pursued backward

and self-defeating animal control strategies

since the dawn of civilization because the logic

of exterminating animals who are perceived as

nuisances appears inescapable: kill them and

they will be no more. Dead animals do not

reproduce, the policymakers reason. Neither do

dead animals transmit deadly diseases, like

rabies, which can only be spread through live

hosts.

Yet life had already evolved a

counter-strategy many hundreds of millions of

years before humans existed. All species, from

the rabies virus to blue whales, reproduce up to

the carrying capacity of their habitat, as

rapidly as possible. If one species succumbs to

disease, disaster, or predation so rapidly that

it cannot fill the habitat, another species

moves in. Never does nature allow habitat to go

unoccupied.

Until the carrying capacity of cities for

free-roaming mid-sized predators and scavengers

is permanently reduced by instituting effective

sanitation, campaigns to exterminate street

dogs, feral cats, or any other established

resident species merely exchanges those animals

for others. Killing dogs and cats not only

removes a major check on the growth of the rat

and mouse population, for instance, but invites

in more problematic species to take their places.

Many Asian cities now have

hard-to-control populations of feral pigs,

macaques, and even jackals, leopards, and

cobras in their suburbs, in consequence of

rapidly reducing dog populations through

sterilization in the more enlightened

communities, and elsewhere through the combined

effects of extermination and great increases in

motor vehicle traffic.

Policymakers in the developing world

often seek for their cities the superficially

animal-free appearance of a " modern " city that

they see in Europe and the U.S., equating this

with ridding themselves of rabies. But casual

outdoor observation of European and U.S. cities

by daylight is deeply deceptive. European and

American cities support even more dogs, cats,

and wild animals per thousand humans than the

cities of the developing world. They have merely

achieved a transition from hosting outdoor

animals, seen in daytime, to hosting mostly

indoor pets and nocturnal wildlife.

Motor vehicles, rather than any animal

control strategies, appear to be the major

transitionary agents. Motor vehicle traffic

reduces street dog populations by killing dogs,

obviously enough, but this is the least of the

vehicular impacts, and is no different in effect

from animal control killing. Busy streets also

isolate dogs from each other, inhibiting

reproduction. Most important, replacing urban

grain storage for work animals with gasoline

stations steeply reduces the numbers of rats

accessible to dogs. Replacing work animals with

cars and trucks also eliminates animal droppings

from the streets, an important " filler " food for

street dogs.

As street dogs disappear, ceding

scavenging roles to raccoons and opossums in the

U.S., and pigs and monkeys in much of the rest

of the world, feral cats proliferate.

The same factors affect the cat

population, but cats are smaller, so are better

able to survive on the remaining food sources,

without canine competition. Cats are also better

able to prey upon mice and rats who live indoors,

and cats are able to spend their days away from

traffic on rooftops or in crawl spaces, hunting

by night.

If feral cat populations steeply

diminish, as has occurred in the U.S. and

Britain during the past 15-20 years through the

introduction of feral cat sterilization programs,

the habitat niches that the cats formerly filled

are taken over by urbanized wild predators

including coyotes, foxes, fishers, bobcats,

hawks, owls, and eagles.

But neither dogs nor cats actually

decline in numbers, as illustrated by comparing

data collected by pioneering dog and cat

population ecologist John Marbanks in 1947-1950,

when canine rabies still raged in the U.S., to

the findings of more recent studies.

Sixty years ago, just after World War

II, the mechanization of transportation and

establishment of urban sanitation were about as

advanced in the U.S. as they are today in

Ethiopia, India, and much of the rest of Africa

and Asia, as well as Latin America. Not

surprisingly, Marbanks found that about 30% of

the U.S. dog population were what we would now

term street dogs, and about 30 million cats were

what we would now term feral, a situation

comparable to what we now see in the developing

world.

Marbanks estimated that there were only

600,000 street dogs in the already heavily

motorized Northeast, but were 3.5 million in the

South and 2.3 million in the Midwest, the two

most agrarian parts of the U.S.

More than 20 years passed before the U.S.

dog and cat populations were again studied in

depth. By then, in the early 1970s, the U.S.

street dog population had disappeared. The feral

cat population rose in the absence of street dogs

to a peak of about 40 million circa 1990, then

fell with the advent of neuter/return to today's

levels of about six million in winter, 12

million in summer.

In the interim, the number of cars and

miles driven in the U.S. had tripled. The pet

dog and cat populations rose proportionate to the

human population. The pet dog population

increased by just about exactly as much as the

street dog population declined. The biomass of

dogs and cats relative to human population

remained almost the same.

Canine rabies was already close to

elimination, but not because there were fewer

dogs. Rather, canine rabies had nearly

disappeared because unvaccinated street dogs had

been replaced by an almost equal number of

vaccinated pets.

 

Carrying capacity

 

In effect, mechanization of transport

and improvements in urban sanitation reallocated

the carrying capacity of the human environment.

Instead of supporting dogs and cats who lived

directly off of refuse and rodents, the human

environment evolved to support dogs and cats who

lived on refuse that was processed into pet food,

fed to them in human homes.

This same reallocation of carrying

capacity has occurred in western Europe, and is

occurring now in eastern Europe, India, China,

Ethiopia, and wherever else economic development

is transforming former hubs of agrarian commerce

into technologically developed modern cities.

Paving streets tends to eliminate feral

pigs, since pigs need mud to wallow in. That

tends to leave more habitat to monkeys, if

free-roaming dogs disappear-mostly macaques in

Asia, baboons in Africa. Macaques and baboons

do not run from feral cats, bite more often and

more dangerously than dogs, are capable of

transmitting more deadly diseases to humans than

any other animals even though they rarely carry

rabies, can outclimb cats, and are often

smarter than the public policymakers whose

misguided ideas about animal control invite their

presence.

Completely eliminating rabies from Addis

Ababa and other major cities in the developing

world would be a big job, but Larghi's

vaccination efforts in Latin America were bigger

still. Such a program in Addis Ababa would

appear to have public support, as the plan to

poison dogs was not well-accepted, even among

Muslims who told reporters-wrongly-that the

Prophet Mohammed forbade keeping dogs as pets.

" Dogicide is an act that should be

condemned in the strongest words possible, "

wrote Kassahun Addis of the Sub-Saharan Informer

weekly newspaper.

Similar defenses of dogs have emerged

around the world in recent years wherever dog

purges have been waged or even rumored--even in

nations with long histories of repressing dissent.

Ahead is the urgent task of educating

policymakers about urban ecology and more humane

and effective methods of animal control, of

which rabies control is part.

Equally important is educating

policymakers about how to successfully enlist the

support of pro-animal donors and foundations.

Governments have been handing off

responsibility for animal control to humane

societies by making heavy-handed threats to kill

animals by cruel means for 130 years now,

beginning in 1877 when the Women's Humane Society

of Philadelphia took over the Philadelphia pound

to halt the practices of clubbing and drowning

dogs and cats.

Of note is that the response of the U.S.

humane community included significant wrong

turns, which actually delayed the eradication of

canine rabies by decades.

American SPCA founder Henry Bergh

resisted pressure to take over the New York City

pounds, accurately perceiving that the job would

sap the ability of the ASPCA to do effective

anti-cruelty advocacy, but seven years after

Bergh's death the ASPCA did assume the pound job

and held it for the next 100 years, killing more

than a quarter of a million dogs and cats per

year in the 1960s, mostly by gas.

Humane societies increasingly felt

themselves compelled to take responsibility for

animal control sheltering after policymakers

discovered the persuasive effect of selling

animals to laboratories. The American Humane

Association, as the only national humane society

in the U.S. before the mid-20th century,

responded by urging humane societies to take

animal control contracts--and to boycott

compulsory rabies vaccination, as vaccine

development and production were perceived as

unacceptably cruel to laboratory animals and the

sheep whose brains were used to make the early

rabies vaccines. (The sheep brain vaccines were

long ago replaced in most of the world by

vaccines cultivated in hens' eggs.)

For much of the 20th century the chief

occupation of U.S. humane societies was killing

dogs and cats by the multi-million, in the names

of rabies control and population control, while

the moral vision and momentum of the early humane

movement slumped into despairing self-isolation.

The brightest outlook for the future offered by

1963 humane movement historian William Alan

Swallow was not that either rabies or pet

overpopulation could be contained, but rather

that humane societies might take over the pet

cemetery business.

As the numbers of impounded dogs and cats

only increased, with no money available to

subsidize and promote sterilization, many humane

societies resorted to killing methods, such as

mass gassing and decompression, that were not

much less cruel, if at all, than the methods of

the private animal control contractors they had

replaced.

The lowest point may have come when

then-nationally prominent anti-vivisection

evangelist Ann Brandt, now long forgotten, was

arrested in the act of drowning cats in a barrel.

Much of the U.S. humane community is now

out of the high-volume animal killing business,

albeit seldom easily and often with considerable

misgivings about returning animal control duties

to municipal management.

Yet the humane community has learned that

while donors will not generously support

organizations known for killing animals, they do

contribute far beyond anyone's anticipation 30

years ago to prevent killing through

sterilization and vaccination. Among the

best-known examples are the ninefold increase in

donations experienced by the San Francisco SPCA

in the decade after it went no-kill in 1984, and

the explosive growth of the no-kill Best Friends

Animal Society from marginal viability in 1990

into one of the largest and still fastest-growing

humane organizations in the world.

Since the early 1970s, sterilization

programs subsidized by pro-animal donors have

helped to cut the numbers of dogs and cats killed

in U.S. shelters and pounds from 115 per 1,000

Americans to 12.5.

Belated humane support of vaccination

meanwhile reduced canine rabies to the verge of

extirpation within a decade of the late start,

and completed the eradication with intensive

efforts wherever cases appeared thereafter.

Now the developing world needs to learn

from the U.S. experience--and, most critically,

needs to avoid repeating the U.S. mistakes.

 

Building success

 

This is not an argument that humane

societies should stay altogether out of doing

animal control work.

Indeed, humane societies have vital

roles in doing the job effectively and kindly.

The many highly effective Animal Birth Control

programs operated by humane societies in India

offer models for the world, along with similar

programs in Turkey, Thailand, Indonesia, and

parts of eastern Europe. While many of these

programs can be improved, they are clearly

making progress in the right direction.

Humane societies should avoid assuming

financial responsibility for impounding

potentially infinite numbers of animals, which

often leads to operating death camps. However,

humane societies are much better positioned than

public agencies, especially in the developing

world, to offer sterilization, vaccination,

and other lifesaving services, and to do public

education.

The critical lesson to impart to

policymakers is that extortion does not raise the

resources that the humane community needs to do

the work it can do best. Neither does impatience

help small charities to grow into doing big jobs.

Few if any humane societies in the

developing world (or anywhere) have built

sterilization programs faster than Animal Help,

of Ahmedabad, India, but Animal Help built

capacity for six years before it sterilized and

vaccinated 50,000 dogs in 2006. Founder Rahul

Sehgal frankly acknowledges that the time and

practice was essential to subsequent success.

If the municipal officials of Addis Ababa

want HAPS to help them purge the city of rabies

and a perceived over-abundance of street dogs,

they must help HAPS to build capacity and

demonstrate, step by step, the potential for

further growth.

Even more important, the municipal

officials of Addis Ababa-and every other city

threatening to kill animals if humane donors do

not intervene-must understand that donors will

not contribute money if they fear that all the

animals will be killed no matter what. Humane

donors are continually asked to support

worthwhile projects, in all parts of the world.

Deciding which are most worthy of support, most

donors will choose the programs that they

perceive are most likely to achieve happy

endings.

Programs under stress from unsympathetic

governments tend to look like bad bets, no

matter what their achievements, as the Bangalore

humane societies Compassion Unlimited Plus

Action, the Animal Rights Fund, Krupa, and

Karuna can testify.

The four charities' internationally

recognized ABC programs, cited as positive

examples by World Health Organization chief F.X.

Meslin, had eliminated rabies from their service

areas and had brought the dog population down

markedly before 2007.

This year, however, Bangalore city

officials wrongly blamed the ABC programs for two

fatal dog attacks, which occurred chiefly

because the city government failed to stop

butchers in areas outside the ABC program limits

from dumping meat wastes in vacant lots--despite

repeated warnings from the Animal Rights Fund.

The officials' attacks obliged the

Bangalore humane societies to suspend their ABC

work, and severely harmed their ability to raise

funds to resume. Poor administration of the

Bangalore municipal animal control program

meanwhile allowed rabies to re-infiltrate the

city.

Success builds on success. Successful

humane societies can eradicate canine rabies

worldwide and help communities in even the

poorest, most remote places to achieve humane

animal population control-but only when

policymakers properly understand and contribute

to the necessary preconditions.

 

 

 

 

--

Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

 

Telephone: 360-579-2505

Fax: 360-579-2575

E-mail: anmlpepl

Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org

 

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