Killing dogs does not stop the spread of rabies, confirms major Indonesian study, from ANIMAL PEOPLE 12/04

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2004:

 

Killing dogs does not stop the spread of rabies, confirms major

Indonesian study

 

BANGKOK, FALLUJAH, BUCHAREST, BEIJING, CAIRO,

COLOMBO--If, as Winston Churchill advised, one should never

attribute to malice what may be attributed to stupidity, official

stupidity rather than malice failed to prevent rabies outbreaks and

drove dog massacres in at least 18 nations during the latter half of

2004.

Dogs were shot, poisoned, gassed, clubbed, or

electrocuted by the tens of thousands because many authorities in

much of the world have yet to recognize that mass vaccination is the

only effective means of stopping or even slowing a canine rabies

epidemic.

Dog massacres were even reported in three states of

Argentina, where Oscar P. Larghi, M.D., showed during the 1990s

that intensive three-month vaccination campaigns can virtually

eradicate rabies from major cities.

" Even massive culling of the dog population, without an

intensive vaccination campaign among the survivors, will not arrest

an outbreak [of rabies] even if it occurs on a small island, "

concluded Indonesian Ministry of Health rabies control expert

Caccilia Windiyaningsih, in the November 2004 edition of the Journal

of the Medical Association of Thailand. Windiyaningsih extensively

reviewed one of the most intensive efforts on record to stop rabies

by killing dogs.

" Flores is an isolated previously rabies-free Indonesian

island which has been experiencing a canine rabies outbreak, "

resulting in at least 113 deaths through June 2004, Windiyaningsih

began.

The Flores rabies outbreak " started with the import of three

dogs from rabies-endemic Sulawesi in September 1987, " Windiyaningsih

wrote. " Local authorities responded with massive killing of dogs, "

in early 1998.

" Approximately 70% of the dogs in the district where rabies

had been introduced were killed that year, " Windiyaningsih found,

" yet canine rabies still exists on Flores. "

Cats and monkeys were also targeted, to no avail.

" Before the current rabies outbreak, there were an estimated

600,000-800,000 dogs on the island, " Windiyaningsih elaborated.

" Almost all were owned and semi-controlled. They had not been

vaccinated against rabies, since rabies had never been reported

previously in Flores. Dogs were kept as watchdogs, pets, for food,

and for trade. "

Dog meat sellers, not street dogs, were most culpable for

the spread of rabies on Flores. " Some citizens did not kill their

dogs and moved them to the next as-yet rabies-free district, and

sold them in markets, " Windiyaningsih explained. " Some of these dogs

incubated rabies and this contributed to the spread to other

districts. "

In East Flores, where the rabies outbreak started, 53,204

dogs were killed in 1998. Only 5,314 dogs remained as of 2002, of

whom only 40% were vaccinated, not even close to the 70% vaccination

rate needed to stop an epidemic, and less than half of the 85% rate

that the World Health Organization recommends as the goal of

vaccination campaigns, to create a margin of safety.

Across the whole of Flores, 80% of the dog population was

killed. Just 46% of the survivors were vaccinated.

Even after Flores authorities realized that the dog massacres

were not stopping rabies, Windiyaningsih noted, " No island-wide dog

vaccination campaign was implemented, as had been recommended by two

WHO consultants. "

The consultants, Henry Wilde of the Queen Saovabha Memorial

Institute in Thailand and WHO rabies expert F.X. Meslin, were

credited as co-authors of Windiyaningsih's paper, along with fellow

Indonesian Ministry of Health personnel Thomas Suroso and H.S.

Widarso.

" An additional 226,698 or more dogs were killed after 1999, "

Windiyaningsih continued. " Nevertheless, canine rabies was not

eliminated. Out of 2,881 dogs tested for rabies, 2,318 were found

positive (80%). "

" East Flores and Sikka districts continued culling dogs up to

2001, " Windiyaningsih reported. " They were not successful in

eliminating the disease. Ende and Ngada (districts) started massive

killing of dogs in 2000, but made only meek efforts to follow this

with vaccination for the remaining canine population. Both districts

still experienced canine and human rabies in 2001. Only Lembata, an

isolated adjacent island district, remained free of human rabies,

but did report 37 cases of canine rabies and probably had more.

However, " Windiyaningsih observed, " Lembata was the only district

that vaccinated over 50% of their dog population. "

The East Flores dog killingbegan more than a year after the

first human rabies case occurred, ANIMAL PEOPLE noted in June 1998.

The killing was ordered early in the unrest that brought the May 1998

fall of the Suharto dictatorship. Officials hinted as the killing

began that dissidents might be seen as mad dogs, by a regime formed

amid the 1965 slaughter of 300,000 ethnic Chinese citizens in the

name of purging Communists.

 

Dogs & democracy

 

Windiyaningsih's findings affirmed the view expressed 31

years earlier by Dr. William Winkler of the Centers for Disease

Control and Prevention, in the National Academy of Sciences'

handbook Control of Rabies, that " Persistant trapping or poisoning

campaigns as a means to rabies control should be abolished. There is

no evidence, " Winkler wrote, " that these costly and politically

attractive programs reduce either wildlife reservoirs or rabies

incidence. "

Killing animals in the name of rabies control remains

politically attractive, worldwide, in part because the professed

need to exterminate dogs or other species provides a pretext for

shaky governments to keep soldiers busy, create patronage

employment, enlist the loyalty of ruffians who might otherwise make

trouble, and in the most extreme scenarios, fill the streets with

armed men whose gunfire tends to keep the public indoors,

intimidated, away from mass demonstration--like those in Kiev that

in November 2004 overturned the results of a corrupt national

election.

A decade of sterilization, vaccination, and public

education by SOS Animals Ukraine, founded in 1994 by former United

Nations journalist Tamara Tarnawska, has ensured that there are few

mad dogs left in Kiev--and the success of the Ukrainian democracy

movement put into context the viciousness of the repression that SOS

Animals Ukraine met during the 1990s when it challenged the local

animal control establishment. Supporters' apartments were invaded

and their dogs clubbed to death in front of them, Tarnawska herself

was criminally accused of illegally possessing veterinary drugs,

vehicles were sabotaged, death threats were received even in the

presence of sympathetic news media, and the SOS Animals Ukraine

veterinarian suffered brain damage and serious memory loss in a

suspicious car crash that killed two other people.

In hindsight, taking mad dogs out of the Ukrainian political

discourse may have been the beginning of the end of the

post-Communist authoritarian regime.

 

Dog soldiers

 

Agence France-Presse on December 9 described the massacre of

dogs and cats that followed the 1st U.S. Marine Expeditionary Force

occupation of Fallujah, Iraq.

The Iraqi newspaper Al Sabeh reported on October 6 that more

than 60 human rabies cases had occurred in Al Anbar province before

the U.S. invaded Fallujah.

" Dr. Imad Al Deen Al Nagash, director of health monitoring

in the Iraqi Ministry of Health, was quoted as saying that the

spread of the disease was due to a shortage of vaccines, a shortage

of post-exposure treatments, the abundance of stray dogs, and a low

level of awareness among citizens, " translated the Xinhuanet New

Agency.

" Al Nagash stated that more than 145,000 children will be

vaccinated despite the ongoing military operations in Fallujah,

Ramadi, and two districts of Anbar Governorate, " Xinuanet

continued.

The vaccination effort probably never occurred. Neither did

the U.S. Marines bring supplies of Raboral, the oral rabies vaccine

made to immunize animals who cannot be captured for injections, nor

even conventional rabies vaccines and animal control know-how. What

they brought, replacing their combat weapons for dog-and-cat

killing, were blazing shotguns, demonstrating the approach that

fifty years ago left the rural South as the last part of the U.S.

with endemic canine rabies, long after vaccination eradicated it

elsewhere.

Truly feral cats and street dogs were probably few, as the

Saddam Hussein regime had encouraged troops to use them for target

practice, and the survivors, like the survivors of cat and dog

purges everywhere, learned to be nocturnal and seldom seen. Pets

left by refugees from the fighting, on the other hand, would have

been easily killed.

Marines told Agence France-Presse that they were getting rid

of a potential disease vector before the refugees returned. None

seemed to realize that some returning refugees might be looking for

their lost pets.

 

Dog meat & rabies

 

The Xinhuanet attention to the Iraq rabies outbreak came

after 10 human rabies cases were reported in Cixi, China. After

several days of public announcements, Cixi officials and help hired

on a bounty basis reportedly killed 44,000 dogs in five days. A

similar massacre followed in Guilen.

Chinese news media described the victims as unvaccinated

pets. Internet activist alerts asserted in thinly disguised rewrites

of alerts distributed before the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens that

the killings were part of an official campaign to rid China of street

dogs before the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

Neither claim appeared credible.

Unlike Greece, where as many as 15,000 street dogs

reportedly disappeared in the years leading up to the 2004 Olympics,

China has few true street dogs, as they have not been officially

tolerated since the first major national dog purge closely followed

the Communist takeover in 1949.

Photos of the Cixi dog massacre showed that most of the

victims were the relatively large yellow dogs called " meat dogs " in

southern and coastal China and Korea.

Neither Cixi nor Guilen is anywhere near Beijing, or a major

route to Beijing, nor is either one a popular tourist destination in

itself. Both, however, are hub cities in districts known to

harbor huge dog meat farms, where few dogs are kept as pets.

The numbers of dogs killed were exceptionally high compared

to the numbers reportedly killed during past purges of illegally kept

pets in Beijing and Shanghai, both of which are vastly larger cities.

Finally, while China has strict laws mandating vaccination

of pet dogs against rabies, dogs raised for meat are exempted

because of a belief that vaccinated dogs cannot be safely eaten.

Officially, " meat dogs " are kept out of contact with other dogs, but

all canine rabies outbreaks known to have occurred in China within

the past dozen years have come in the dog meat producing and

consuming southern and coastal regions, not in the Beijing area, nor

in the interior, where dog-eating has been uncommon.

The illegal Philippine dog meat trade may have been involved

in the rabies outbreak that brought the poisoning of about 1,500 dogs

in Legazpi during the week of November 18. The university city of

Dumaguete, several islands away, relied on sharpshooters to kill

about 500 street dogs during the first half of 2004, out of a

population estimated at 12,000.

 

Romania

 

Political considerations were clearly behind late summer and

fall dog and cat purges in Bucharest, Romania, after mayor Traian

Basescu was re-elected in June and promptly declared his candidacy

for president of the nation. Basescu, whose political career has

been built upon dog-killing and mass arrests of prostitutes, on

December 12 claimed a disputed victory in the presidential runoff.

In Galatzi, Romania, the Anglo-Indian firm Ispat

International acquired the vast SIDEX steel mill complex and pledged

to replace obsolete equipment notorious for producing pollution--and

showed serious intent, ROLDA cofounder Dana Costen e-mailed to

ANIMAL PEOPLE, by hiring dogcatchers to kill at least 1,000 of the

estimated 3,000 dogs who inhabit the vicinity, mostly as pets of

more than 5,000 workers and their families. Many of the dogs had

been sterilized and vaccinated, Costen said.

In Serbia, Zov Society president Tadic Snezana alleged in a

five-page e-mail, more than 40 dogs were clubbed and injected with

the insecticide Dichlorvos on October 18 at the village of Kolut, by

order of Jovan Slavkovic, M.D., who in September was elected mayor

of the nearby city of Somor. The owner of the land where the dogs

were buried, Snezana wrote, tried to intervene, but he and his

watchman " were removed from the spot by brutal physical force. "

 

Egypt & Turkey

 

A dog massacre announced in Cairo in mid-September

appeared--briefly--to have been averted, through timely response by

the Egyptian Federation of Animal Welfare, Egyptian Society of

Animal Friends, and the Society to Protect Animal Rights in Egypt.

" We suddenly have the beginning of a new era in Cairo, " EFAW

and ESAF chief executive Ahmed El-Sherbiny and SPARE founder Amina

Abaza jointly e-mailed on October 27. " The head of the government

veterinary department who has in the past directed poisoning and

shooting campaigns has been replaced by Dr. Ahmed Tawfik. Dr. Tawfik

is very interested in neuter/return as an alternative to shooting and

poisoning, and wants to know more. He feels it would take about

three years to see the results of a neuter/return program, which is

a good indication that he does not expect overnight results, "

El-Sherbiny and Abaza reported, after meeting with him.

Tawfik " was up front, " El-Sherbiny and Abaza cautioned,

" that he would probably have to continue shooting and poisoning until

the neuter/return program is well advanced, in response to pressure

from above. "

Blue Cross of India chief executive Chinny Krishna and

Perihan Agnelli, founder of Fethiye Friends of Animals, flew to

Cairo to help get a neuter/return program started. Krishna

engineered the Indian national Animal Birth Control program. Agnelli

founded a similar program in 2000 in Fethiye, Turkey, which in June

2004 became the official model for animal control throughout the

nation, as part of a new national animal welfare law.

The Indian ABC program, despite significant success over

many years, still meets frequent opposition from politicians who

would prefer to hire dog-killing goondas.

Likewise, the new Turkish policy was soon challenged by dog

shootings and poisonings in at least three cities. Internal affairs

minister Abdulkadir Aksu on November 4 officially reminded the

administrators of 81 cities about their obligations under the law.

The appearance of progress in Egypt hit a similar setback in

late November.

" They are killing thousands of dogs, " SPARE volunteer Mona

Khalil e-mailed. " My two special dogs were killed for no reason. A

person who did not want them around called the police, who came and

shot them. The police are cooperating with the veterinary

department, which uses poison. "

 

Sri Lanka

 

The news from Sri Lanka was more encouraging. After two

Colombo residents reportedly died of rabies in September 2004, Sri

Lanka health minister Nimal Siripala de Silva on September 22

announced his intent to reduce the Sri Lankan street dog population

from 2.5 million to one million, veterinarian Kala Santha e-mailed

to ANIMAL PEOPLE.

Santha had for years vocally opposed a catch-and-kill program

that Sri Lankan officials repeatedly claimed was modeled after

recommendations of the World Society for the Protection of Animals.

A second ominous sign from Colombo came when neuter/return

activists Shyama Peries and Kumudhini Saravanamuttu were charged with

" abandoning " animals, as described by Sagarica Rajakarunanayake of

the group Sathva Mithra in the September 2004 edition of ANIMAL

PEOPLE.

Peries and Saravanamuttu were acquitted, however, on October 26.

Regime change was already underway at WSPA. Especially noteworthy

was the mid-2004 election of Chinny Krishna to the WSPA board. A

lifelong resident of Chennai, the nearest Indian city to Sri Lanka,

Krishna has often visited Colombo on business.

While Krishna helped to equip programs in Colombo patterned

after the Indian ABC model, new WSPA director for companion animals

Elly Hiby relayed to ANIMAL PEOPLE that epidemiological research had

revealed to the Sri Lankan health ministry that 80% of the dog bites

requiring costly post-exposure anti-rabies treatment turned out to be

not from street dogs, who relatively rarely bite, but from

unvaccinated pets.

This suggested to the health ministry a whole new direction,

Hiby indicated. Instead of trying to exterminate street dogs, which

was not working anyway, the future emphasis of Sri Lankan rabies

control will be on raising the rate of vaccination and sterilization

among pet dogs.

Kandy Association for Comunity Protection Through Animal

Welfare secretary Champa Fernando told ANIMAL PEOPLE on December 15

that the work was " WSPA has moved away from any so-called

'catch-and-kill' policy, and now advocates a combination of

extensive sterilization, rehoming, education into responsible

petkeeping, and compulsory registration, " WSPA director general

Peter Davies affirmed to ANIMAL PEOPLE.

--Merritt Clifton

 

--

Kim Bartlett, Publisher of ANIMAL PEOPLE Newspaper

Postal mailing address: P.O. Box 960, Clinton WA 98236 U.S.A.

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