Mission Rabies Usa

Mission Rabies received a call on our Goa hotline from Palin and his family about their dog, Saroo. Saroo wasn’t at home during the most recent vaccination drive, and had therefore missed his vaccination. He was later attacked by an unknown dog. Saroo then started acting strangely, biting objects and even trying to bite Palin’s father. Luckily Palin, who was only eight years old, had received one of our lessons and noted down the rabies hotline number from a poster displayed in his school. His mother was able to call us immediately and our team rushed there to collect the dog who later tested positive for rabies. Palin’s father had already been scratched through his clothes, so was advised to seek Anti-Rabies Vaccinations at his local Primary Health Care Centre. Palin’s quick thinking enabled his father to receive the treatment he needed to save his life and stopped his whole community from being at further risk from the disease.

Mission Rabies has a long-standing history of successful collaboration with authorities in our field such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). We have provided technical support to the CDC in Haiti; by using our mobile app to map activities and collect data, vaccination coverage in these areas has increased from 40% to 77%. Relationships with local and international partners is central to our work. This is how we lay the foundations for long-term rabies elimination in a given area and make sure that our work is sustainable.

Thanks to our programs, fewer people and animals are needlessly dying of rabies. We have reduced deaths at three major project sites in India and Malawi. There have been no child deaths since 2016 in Goa and no deaths at all since 2018.

In 2012, the largest ever case series of rabies from a single site in Africa was published by The Lancet. The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, had the highest number of child deaths from rabies in the entire African Continent. On World Rabies Day 2018 (Sept 28, 2018), The Lancet reported a pronounced fall in the number of cases presenting to that site, following a successful mass canine vaccination program implemented by Mission Rabies. Since Mission Rabies began the program, just two children presented to hospital with rabies - these two individuals were from outside the project area. The success of Mission Rabies at reducing paediatric rabies in Blantyre illustrates the need to continue and extend this strategy across Malawi.