Newsletter Issue 60

Philippine community health teams working in rabies prevention have implemented the first-ever, real-time use of GARC’s Community Based Rabies Surveillance (CBRS) tool. As of February 2019, local community health workers in Muntinlupa are now actively using this online software tool that is designed to provide simple, yet comprehensive, surveillance of both human and animal rabies exposures.

World Rabies Day, the biggest annual awareness event in the rabies prevention calendar, is just a few months away. September 28, 2019 will be the 13th World Rabies Day, and this year’s theme–Rabies: Vaccinate to Eliminate–focuses on vaccination, the foundation of all rabies control efforts.

GARC recently augmented its Rabies Epidemiological Bulletin (REB)—a rabies-specific disease surveillance tool—by adding a new tracking component that allows laboratory case data to be geographically mapped immediately after it is entered on the REB system. This new database module is called Rabies Case Surveillance (RCS).

In the Philippines, the month of March is celebrated every year as Rabies Awareness Month (RAM), and this year’s event was centered around the theme of “Community as one against rabies, be a responsible pet owner”. The highlight of the celebration was a ceremonial dog vaccination campaign, as well as the ceremonial turnover of eight lesson plans on rabies prevention by GARC and the Department of Education to the National Rabies and Control Committee.

The annual World Rabies Day Awards, brought to you by GARC and MSD Animal Health, celebrate community rabies champions from across the world each year. In the lead up to our 2019 launch for nominations, draw inspiration from some of last year’s awardees by learning more about the rest of the 2018 awardees and their work by viewing some of their personal videos.

In response to several areas in Asia including Malaysia and Indonesia losing their rabies-free status in recent years, the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) organized the Rabies Risk Assessment Workshop from March 6-9, 2019 in Bali, Indonesia. The workshop focused on introducing concepts such as route prioritization, risk assessment and disease modelling, and participants identified high-risk entry points to and from their countries.

GARC’s "Want a Friend? Be a Friend!" booklet was recently translated into Afrikaans, and approximately 6,000 copies were printed and distributed to school children by the Western Cape Veterinary Services office at education events in the South African province.