Focus on rabies control, not stray dog population

Hindustan Times

2 hours ago

The current debate about whether stray dogs in Delhi should have a home on the street or be rounded up into pounds has generated strong feelings on all sides. Regardless of which way a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court rules, the fundamental challenge remains curbing of rabies, the disease reported to be responsible for the death of the six-year-old which sparked this debate. Removing the roughly million stray dogs from Delhi's streets will only reduce rabies cases and deaths by less than 2% nationwide.
A more productive public health approach would be to focus on rabies rather than stray dogs. India has had enormous success in infectious disease control through vaccinations, examples being smallpox, polio, maternal tetanus and most recently, Covid-19.
The country can then surely make significant progress towards the World Health Organization (WHO)'s goal of zero rabies deaths by 2030 without eliminating the 60 million stray dogs in India.
But we are far from that goal. India accounts for one in three rabies deaths globally and over two-thirds in Asia. According to WHO data, there are an estimated 18,000-20,000 deaths from rabies each year in India.
In comparison, China, which has 40 million stray dogs, reported an average of only 433 rabies cases per year between 2015 and 2021. The number of rabies deaths has declined from 3,300 in 2007 to fewer than 300 deaths in 2020.
How did China manage to control rabies without killing its stray dogs? It adopted a one-health approach to rabies control, ensuring close coordination between the human and animal health departments, widening access to post-exposure vaccines (rabies is the only infectious disease that can be addressed using a vaccine post-exposure to the virus), expanding vaccination of all stray dogs and improving surveillance of all dog bites and rabies. China administers approximately 12-15 million rabies vaccine doses every year, at a cost of about $1 billion.
India's rabies control programme is poorly funded and, unlike other disease control programmes, straddles two ministries — health and animal husbandry. With poor coordination, the programme has been a failure as evidenced by the rising numbers of rabies cases.
A few municipalities like Mumbai and Goa have successfully reduced rabies cases and deaths, but nationally, rabies control has been a failure.
The issue pits the right of humans to live safely without getting bitten or attacked against that of most dogs who do not bite anyone. The deaths of children and the elderly due to dog attacks is painful and unacceptable. It is also unacceptable that we consign millions of dogs to a painful death in dog pounds and shelters. For many human communities, strays are part of the community without a designated pet owner. They provide security against outsiders, protection from wild animals, and are generally fed by multiple households. In many instances, most stray dogs exist because of the support of people across the country, and not just because of a small group of urban, well-heeled animal lovers. It will be impossible to get community participation to control rabies if people view the government's programme as an effort to kill their dogs.
Taking this approach in a country with deeply ingrained respect for all life, we may achieve control of neither stray dog population nor of rabies.
The seeds of the current situation were sown by the poorly conceived Animal Birth Control (ABC) Rules, 2001 (updated in 2023) which prevents rabid dogs from being euthanised. Rabid dogs can only be isolated until they die, often a painful death. Even dogs that bite people can be removed from an area after a lengthy investigation and bureaucratic process, which all but ensures that the dog remains in the area. These laws have likely caused an increase in bites and rabies and have diminished public support for stray dogs. In the name of love for animals, the leadership that pushed through that act without much debate has created an untenable situation that forces us to choose between human and animal life.
A public health solution that puts the focus on rabies and dogs that attack humans is far more likely to succeed. In the short term, we must replace the misguided ABC rules with a more common-sense set of guidelines that allow removal of biting and rabid dogs from communities. In the longer term, India should aim to remove all dogs from streets with the aim of eliminating all rabies deaths and ensuring that both humans and dogs are protected.
Ramanan Laxminarayan is president of the One Health Trust. The views expressed are personal.