Vietnam moves to eliminate rabies
The Prime Minister has approved a national programme to control rabies in pet dogs and humans by 2021 with the aim of stamping out the disease.
The programme, designed for 2017-2021, targets that the rate of vaccinated pet dogs in communes, wards and towns will reach over 85%, over 70% of provinces will record no incident of rabies in pet dogs in two consecutive years.
By 2021, over 95% of communes, wards and towns will provide lists of households with pet dogs and the number of fatalities due to rabies will be reduced by 60% in comparison with the average cases recorded in 2011-2015.
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The programme also comes up with a host of measures, including developing and delivering communications documents, improving the capacity of the monitoring system, tightening the transportation of dogs, and investigating and handling rabies hotspots.
Rabies remains a major concern worldwide, killing more than 55,000 people every year.
In January-September, 2016, rabies claimed 49 lives in Vietnam, higher than that of the same period last year.
Vietnam is striving to become one of the leading ASEAN countries in completely eliminating rabies.
