World Vet Day 2011

The theme this year is rabies, so what’s the Trust’s contribution to the eradication of rabies? Well, mass vaccination programmes (as with human malaria prevention programmes) can be enormously costly but the Trust contributed to a rabies inoculation and assessment project that took place in Tanzania.

To set the scene, rabies is a fatal disease causing about 55,000 human deaths in Africa and Asia each year - that’s approximately one person every ten minutes – and almost half the fatalities are children.  In Tanzanian, dogs are essential for protecting livestock and property but they are also believed to be the main reservoir for rabies and distemper in this area. Since a mass vaccination program was implemented, wild dogs that were thought to have been wiped out, have returned to the Serengeti and there have been few reported rabies or distemper deaths in wildlife.  However, all depends on the co-operation of the local people in bringing and identifying dogs needing inoculation, and our own grant-holder saw that there was great enthusiasm,

‘There were at least 150 dogs in this village and about 70% needed to be vaccinated in order to make a significant impact on rabies.  Unlike the villagers, who were smiling and waving, the dogs did not seem pleased to see us!’

The increasingly global nature of expertise and study is reflected in the careers of vets who criss-cross continents in carrying out their work. The vet carrying out this work, Suzanne McNabb MRCVS qualified in Australia, researched in Tanzania, and more recently, Edinburgh.

Other zoonotic grants made by the Trust in previous programmes include:

• £42,000 to improve the monitoring of avian influenza
• £10,000 to study the role of a specific parasite in the symptoms caused by sleeping sickness
• £3,000 to investigate cryptosporidiosis in wildlife, cattle and people in Uganda