Reservoir dogs and furious rabies

The WHO wants to eliminate rabies in Asia by 2020. But how, when rabid dogs are running India ragged? Mary-Rose Abraham reports.

A pile of puppies cower under a parked car. The men grab one, but two escape down the street, forcing them to give chase. Five scrappy adult shorthairs – of an indiscriminate breed commonly known as an ‘Indian dog’ – appear from nowhere. Pointed ears pricked with curiosity, they howl as if sounding an alarm throughout the neighbourhood: the ‘catchers’ are here.

The catchers’ van travels the tree-lined, mostly residential streets to the next area. On the way, a couple of dogs seem to recognise the vehicle, either by sight or by smell. They bark and take chase. Each time the team catches a dog in one of its giant butterfly nets, the mutt twists and turns and howls, trying to escape.

This ritual repeats several times through the day across 50 square kilometres of the south Indian city of Bangalore. The men, a team from the NGO Compassion Unlimited Plus Action (CUPA), are on a mission: to catch stray dogs, sterilise them and vaccinate them against rabies.

They catch ten dogs on this particular day. The dogs are taken to CUPA’s Animal Birth Control centre, where they will be sterilised and have their ears clipped so they can be identified as having undergone the surgery. They will be vaccinated, then returned to their home on the streets.

“What people need to understand,” says Vijay Kumar, manager of the CUPA centre, “is that the Animal Birth Control program is as much about human welfare as it is for dogs.”

This is part of an ongoing – and some say uphill – battle to eliminate rabies from India. Around 59,000 people die from rabies every year, according to a 2015 study published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. The overwhelming majority are in Asia and Africa: India alone accounts for 20,847 deaths, more than one-third of the world’s total, giving it the highest incidence of rabies globally.

Reference:

• Estimating the Global Burden of Endemic Canine Rabies, published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases in April 2015.
• The World Health Organization’s comprehensive site on rabies.
• Stanford University’s overview of the rabies virus.
• What happened to the first patient – a little boy – whom Pasteur successfully treated with the first rabies vaccine (TIME magazine).
• A fascinating New Yorker article on how scientists are using the deadly rabies virus in efforts to map the human brain.