Mara Mobile Veterinary Unit

Category: Dogs | Date: Sep 14 2007 | By: admin

Today, we started visiting local schools to raise awareness for rabies. Each year, 55,000 people die from rabies throughout the world. Majority of victims are in Africa and Asia where large number of unvaccinated dog population persists. If this figure is further broken down, every day there are 100 children who die from rabies in the third world countries. Rabies is often overshadowed by ‘big 3 killers’ of HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria. However, its danger and public health concern should not be underestimated.

Since most of victims of rabid dog bites are small children, we felt that it is important to teach children about the basics of rabies so they know what rabies do to human and what we can do about it. Fearing that they might get beaten by parents for being careless, children who get bitten by dog often tend to keep the incident hidden from parents for couple of days. In today’s lecture I strongly emphasized on the importance of ‘immediate report and treatment’ and that they should never fear reporting to their parents. My lecture consisted of following: what is rabies and how it is transmitted, what kind of symptom rabies show in dogs, what to do when you get bitten by strange dogs (first aid and post exposure injection), what vaccination does and its importance, how to properly handle dogs during vaccination, etc. We lectured at 2 schools and children were very interested in our lecture. In the evening some children even came to help us in vaccination by restraining their dogs. What was nice is that children were willing to learn how to properly handle dogs (with gentleness!) and to raise awareness about this dangerous disease which can easily prevented by simple vaccination of dogs. We are now done with vaccination of 2,300 dogs!