Bali rabies outbreak

[Guest guest]

The following summarizes the advice I have been giving to

animal welfare workers, news media, and public health officials in

Bali for the past four days:

 

 

I have just read in the Jakarta Post that Bali governor Made

Mangku Pastika has reportedly urged Bali residents to kill stray

dogs, in response to a strictly local rabies outbreak that has

killed four people in Uluwatu.

 

The governor's advice is directly contrary to the advice for

such situations offered by the World Health Organization, National

Association of Public Health Veterinarians, and -- in an Indonesian

context -- Caecilia Windyaningsih, Henry Wilde, Francois X. Meslin,

Thomas Suroso, and H.S. Widarso in their landmark study " The Rabies

Epidemic on Flores Island, Indonesia, " a copy of which will follow.

 

Meslin, incidentally, heads WHO, and Wilde in his half

century of medical practice in Thailand has responded to more human

rabies cases than any other physician who ever lived.

 

The governor's recommendation is also a prescription for

making the Uluwatu rabies outbreak much worse, in no time at all.

 

First and most obvious, if a dog is cornered and threatened,

the dog will very likely bite someone. A rabid animal is normally

feverish, and will normally try to lie down quietly somewhere to

die. The frenzied " furious " rabies phase occurs only near the very

end of the animal's life, and often occurs as result of something

disturbing the animal -- such as someone making what the animal sees

as a threatening gesture.

 

Sending citizens out to kill dogs greatly increases the odds

that if there are rabid dogs about, they will bite and infect people.

 

Meanwhile, the best & only really effective barrier against

a rabid dog population is a healthy, vaccinated dog population, who

as usual will be vigilant against the arrival of strange dogs from

outside their neighborhood, and will usually chase them off long

before the human residents become aware of the incursion.

 

Case in point: Bangalore, India. Inner Bangalore, the

oldest and most densely populated part of the city, as of March 2007

had been free of rabies for four years, through the vaccination and

sterilization work of four local animal welfare charities. Then dogs

killed two children in suburbs beyond the reach of the four

societies' program.

 

Grandstanding politicians unleashed a dog pogrom. Thousands

of the vaccinated & sterilized inner Bangalore dogs were killed.

Rabies reappeared within another two months.

 

I went to Bangalore and inspected the scene of the first

attack, before the second attack occurred. It was a place where

illegal butchers' frequent disposal of meat scraps had created an

accident waiting to happen, as the local animal welfare charities

had repeatedly warned, in writing to public officials.

 

I am also familiar with the locale of the Bali rabies

outbreak. In fact, I spent 10 days in the area doing local dog

counts and visiting animal welfare projects on either side of the

Asia for Animals conference that was held in Bali late last summer.

 

By way of quick introduction, I have been reporting about

environmental and public health issues worldwide since 1968, became

a charter member of the Society of Environmental Journalists in 1990,

and was among the first members of the International Society for

Infectious Diseases, formed in 1995, now linking more than 15,000

public health professionals worldwide.

 

I have been editor of ANIMAL PEOPLE, serving more than

30,000 people at more than 10,000 animal control and animal welfare

agencies, since 1992.

 

The first ANIMAL PEOPLE field project was vaccinating and

sterilizing feral cats in northern Fairfield County, Connecticut,

after the arrival of the mid-Atlantic states rabies pandemic. The

mid-Atlantic states raccoon rabies pandemic was the worst outbreak in

the U.S. in 50 years. Beginning in 1976, it took nearly 20 years to

stop, because the federal & state governments did everything wrong

for 15 years, trying to exterminate raccoons instead of vaccinating

them.

 

Once they turned to vaccination, the outbreak was rapidly quelled.

 

Our program created a vaccinated barrier population between

infected raccoons and the pets of the public, and was 100%

successful in the eight communities where we worked.

 

Just to the east, my now deceased friend Dr. Franklin Loew,

then dean of the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine,

organized an effort to use the then brand-new oral rabies vaccine to

try to keep raccoon rabies from spreading to Cape Cod. This was

exactly the opposite of your problem in Bali, where you need to keep

an outbreak isolated on a peninsula in order to extinguish it. Loew

and his successors kept raccoon rabies from reaching Cape Cod for 14

years, just by ensuring that 70% of the raccoons within one mile of

the Cape peninsula were vaccinated.

 

The bottom line is, isolating and eradicating a rabies

outbreak at a location as geographically isolated as Uluwatu is quite

easily accomplished -- if some misguided directive doesn't ensure

that large numbers of additional people are bitten, healthy and

vaccinated dogs are killed, and potentially exposed dogs don't run

everywhere they can go to evade persecution.

 

 

 

--

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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