

Animal Nepal
२०२० सेप्टेम्बर २१
Animal Nepal's September 2020 highlights!
Although effective vaccines are available, Rabies continues to be a real threat in Nepal and it disproportionately affects poorer communities due to a lack of awareness and accessibility to health care. Furthermore, Rabies cases in animals and people are very much underreported, so even though the official numbers are between 100-200 human deaths from rabies each year, the real numbers are likely to be much higher. Despite Nepal's commitment to achieve the zero human rabies deaths by 2030, there still remains widespread misconceptions about rabies, which is why people and animals continue to suffer and die despite the disease being 100% preventable.
Fear of rabies leads to the inhumane culling of millions of dogs every year but it doesn't; stop rabies. Population stabilization of street dogs and vaccination holds the key to eliminating rabies. Animal birth control and rabies prevention remain one of our main areas of focus and World Rabies Day on 28 September is a great occasion for us to not just celebrate our achievements but more importantly, it is a day of action, during which we carry out yearly mass vaccinations, community outreach and set goals for the coming year.
This year, our aim was to reach as wide an audience as possible with rabies prevention messages. The entire month of September was dedicated to rabies awareness, whereby we collaborated with a national radio station - Radio Kantipur - to bring weekly conversations about rabies with experts from the field. The topics covered rabies prevention, dog welfare, dog bite prevention, medical care after a dog bite, etc.
On the days leading up to World Rabies Day, we carried out a series of vaccination camps for street and owned dogs in different parts of Lalitpur and Kirtipur. Similarly, we vaccinated working equines in Nepalgunj as well. This year, we were unable to carry out our yearly vaccination camp in Lumbini due to the COVID-19 restrictions. On this World Rabies Day, we vaccinated a total of 256 animals (dogs, cats, and equines).