GET REAL on stray dogs

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GET REAL on stray dogs

India tops the world in rabies deaths. Rabies is 100% fatal, just like AIDS, and stray dogs are the number one transmitters of the disease in India.

It is hard to get any figures on human rabies cases (tragically, half of them are small children) as the Ministry of Health does not require hospitals to report cases.

The best estimate available is the WHO’s National Multi-Centric Rabies Survey of 2003, which puts the figure at 20,000 rabies deaths a year in India.

Doctors candidly state that the infected person is treated as an outpatient, given a heavy course of tranquilisers for a week and sent home to die as peacefully as can be hoped. So statistics on the number of rabies deaths are not maintained and neither are there credible records of the numbers of stray dogs.

According to WHO’s 2003 report, there are over 22 million dogs in India of which 14 million are strays.

Full Story by Janaki Lenin and Meghna Uniyal, with a horrific photograph by Nikhil Devasar here