Rabies: The Revolution Wears Green Collars

Rabies is a grave problem in Pakistan – underreported, underdiagnosed, and the fight against it is underfunded. Local estimates suggest that every year, up to 5,000 people in the country fall victim to the disease. As stray dogs often transmit it, a vicious cycle starts: people see stray dogs as a threat, react with hostility – and inadvertently increase the likelihood to get bitten. To stop this, Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health is supporting the project “Rabies Free Pakistan” together with the Indus Hospital in Karachi. Our aim: to save lives while improving the relationship between humans and animals!

Every day, doctors, nurses, and other medical staff in the hospital treat up to 50 people suspected of having been exposed to rabies in their Rabies Prevention Center. Most of the time, they have no way of knowing whether the dog that bit them hads been vaccinated or not. As they don’t know whether the bite is rabies-prone, every bite is treated as a suspected case of rabies transmission.

How to break the chain of rabies transmission

If untreated, rabies is 100 percent fatal once the earliest symptoms occur. However, it is also 100 percent preventable with proper vaccination protocols and awareness programs. Therefore, since 2015, the international rabies community has been pursuing the global target of eliminating rabies transmission from dogs to humans through a One Health approach before 2030. More than 100 countries and partners such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) have been engaged in an ambitious role: sustainable vaccination of 70 percent of the at-risk dog population in an attempt to confer herd immunity and eliminate the disease.

Any effective fight against human rabies infections is synonymous with thorough dog vaccination campaigns. Back in 2018, the Indus Hospital Research Center (IHRC) initiated Rabies Free Pakistan (RFP) as a pilot project in a village near Karachi with a large stray dog population. After engaging the local community and earning the backing of the local government, the center also received support from the WHO that donated 10,000 doses of animal vaccine and provided a trainer to instruct local field workers on dog catching and vaccinating.

Protecting dogs to save human lives

The project started mass dog vaccination and animal birth control, but it was still difficult to distinguish vaccinated from unvaccinated dogs. To improve post-vaccination monitoring, Boehringer Ingelheim supplied 5,000 plastic green collars to RFP in addition to 10,000 doses of injectable rabies vaccines for dogs, to put on vaccinated strays. The field workers were taught how to tie the green collars to vaccinated dogs, making it much easier to find the right dogs to immunize. But there was more: something happened that surprised everybody.

What a difference a collar makes!

Soon more and more dogs were found sporting these collars, and the local community began to recognize them as being vaccinated. In a community feedback, 60 percent of people reported that they react to uncollared stray dogs with hostility, by teasing, running away or pelting them with stones. However, once collared, 93 percent of people reported adopting a neutral behavior instead. In turn, the dogs became more placid as well. Six months after the team introduced green collars, not a single dog bite by a green-collared dog has been reported.

Word about the green collars spread quickly, with many discussing their effect on social media. Requests are coming in from other cities in Pakistan to provide them with the vaccine and collars.

Long-term partnership for sustainable success

The initiative is only beginning, and Karachi is just a pilot of an ambitious project designed to expand to other regions and even countries. In spite of COVID-19 adding extra challenges to vaccination campaigns, Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health has remained a trustful partner. Guillaume Convert, Veterinary Public Health and Rabies Technical Service Director, notes that the highlight of this initiative is a change in mind-set.

“We want people to see that when fighting against rabies, small measures like our dog collars can go a long way. Not only are they low cost, but they improve the way people and animals interact,” he says.

For Dr. Naseem Salahuddin, Project Director of Rabies Free Pakistan, long-term partnerships with both institutions and the private sector are fundamental to confront rabies sustainably.

“We are glad to have found a reliable partner in Boehringer Ingelheim. Together, we continually look for new and better ways of controlling rabies in Pakistan,” she shares.

The country still has a long way to go in the elimination of dog-transmitted rabies, yet this example shows that small changes can have a deep impact – on both lives and relationships.