Eliminating canine rabies in Phnom Penh and Kandal provinces.
Dogs Trust. Cambodia
This project seeks to implement the educational part of a vaccination, development and surveillance programme to educate children on how to stay safe around free-roaming dogs and to quickly treat bites. This three-part approach is seen by the World Health Organisation as the most effective way to eliminate canine rabies – one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases.
Children under 15yrs are particularly vulnerable, accounting for 40% of the 59,000 global deaths annually. Our mass educational campaign seeks to educate around 270,000 children across Phnom Penh and Kandal provinces, since Cambodia suffers from one of the highest rabies deaths per capita in the world and it is estimated that 600,000 people are bitten by dogs every year. If a rabid dog bites someone and they don’t immediately seek post-exposure prophylaxis, and clinical symptoms manifest, the disease is almost invariably fatal.
The need for urgent, integrated intervention is clear. Mission Rabies - a joint project of Dogs Trust and Worldwide Veterinary Services (WVS) - is leading the charge to change this, building on six years of strategic groundwork, robust data collection and excellent government collaboration.
Mission Rabies Project focuses on:
vaccinating at least 70% of the canine population - the coverage needed to eliminate the disease in dogs and prevent human deaths;
educating at least 80% of children on how to stay safe around dogs;
maintaining surveillance via a bespoke mobile App to check for unvaccinated dogs and new human cases;
working with local community groups to raise awareness of the risk of rabies and offer lifesaving knowledge.
During the 2024 intensive rabies elimination campaign in Cambodia, where the vaccination element ran from 21 October to 4 November, 287 vaccination teams worked across the Provinces of Phnom Penh, Kandal and Battambang in a united effort to protect human and animal lives.
During this time, 229,488 dogs were successfully vaccinated against rabies.
