SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Rabies, once it reaches your central nervous system and symptoms appear, has a 100% fatality rate in humans, but it is also 100% preventable. And now there's a new international effort to boost access to human rabies vaccinations. NPR's Gabrielle Emanuel reports.
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GABRIELLE EMANUEL, BYLINE: Stray dogs are a common sight in the Philippines. Ricky Dann Marquez never thought much about them until, in his first year as a doctor at a rural hospital, a teenage girl was brought in. Her mother told him that a month ago, she'd been bitten by a stray dog and had recently started acting strangely.
RICKY DANN MARQUEZ: It's terrible. It's terrible.
EMANUEL: The girl was trying to bite people, and she had an uncontrollable fear of water.
MARQUEZ: We have to tie the patient in the bed.
EMANUEL: You have to tie the patient to the bed so they won't thrash about.
MARQUEZ: Yeah. They don't thrash about. They won't bite anyone.
EMANUEL: As it turned out, the girl had gotten rabies from the dog bite. If she had rushed to get a rabies vaccine immediately after the bite, she'd have been fine. But now that the viral disease had made its way to her brain, there was nothing Marquez could do. He watched helplessly. He remembers the girl's mother wouldn't leave her side.
MARQUEZ: Her mother was just watching her in the bedside, telling her that she loves her, and that's the heartbreaking part of it, when the mother is telling her goodbyes to her daughter.
EMANUEL: Each year, about 60,000 families have to say goodbye to a relative that's dying from rabies. Most are in Asia or Africa. Starting this month, lower-income countries can apply to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, for help paying for the post-exposure human rabies vaccine. They can also get help buying syringes and the refrigerators necessary to keep the vaccines cold.
TERENCE SCOTT: It will be a game changer. I mean, it's huge for the rabies community.
EMANUEL: Terence Scott is with the Global Alliance for Rabies Control. He says such international help is needed because in many places, officials don't prioritize paying for the rabies vaccine, which disproportionately strikes in rural communities, and about half of cases are in children under 15.
SCOTT: It's often seen as insignificant in many people's eyes because it's a disease that affects the poorest of the poor and most underserved communities.
EMANUEL: But experts say it is possible to control rabies. North and South America are proof. In the past four decades, they've slashed the number of human rabies cases by over 95%.
MARCO VIGILATO: Now, the reported cases is less than 10 cases.
EMANUEL: Marco Vigilato coordinates the rabies elimination program for the Pan American Health Organization.
VIGILATO: Many countries in our region - Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia - they don't report human rabies transmitted by dogs anymore. We have all the tools to eliminate rabies.
EMANUEL: But he says treating people immediately after a bite is only an interim solution. Instead, the main tool involves stopping the virus before a person gets infected. That means putting money into mass vaccination for dogs. They're responsible for up to 99% of rabies cases in humans. These vaccination campaigns often involve more than just dogs and vets.
VIGILATO: So you have dentists, nurses, doctors, vaccinating dogs. Other places they work with the students from high school, for example, or they use the army.
EMANUEL: Vigilato says the goal is to vaccinate at least 70% of dogs. Then rabies cases in humans will plummet. In his mind, to really tackle this disease, the global community needs to put animal health at the center of a human health strategy.
Gabrielle Emanuel, NPR News.
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