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China experiences huge rise in rabies

21/08/2008

There has been a dramatic jump in the number of human rabies cases in China since the new millennium, a report has shown.

A study published in the BMC Infectious Diseases journal today looked at the rabies trend in China between 1990 and 2007.

"In China, human rabies was largely under control during the years 1990-1996, via nationwide rabies vaccination programmes. Since the end of the century, however, cases of human rabies have jumped high enough to trigger a warning sign for control and prevention", said Jia-Hai Lu, from the School of Public Health at Sun Yat-Sen University.

Rabies is transmitted by animal bites and involves an infection of the nervous system.

There are reported to be over 50,000 deaths around the world each year from rabies.

For their report, researchers looked at the 22,527 human rabies cases in China from January 1990 to July 2007.

The authors found that human rabies was under control from 1990 to 1996, when there were only 159 cases reported. However, the figure jumped dramatically to 3,279 cases in 2006.

The infection was most frequently encountered in the south-western and southern territories of China, where the authors claimed there was a lack of "strictly enforced measures to eliminate dog rabies or an ample supply of modern cell culture rabies vaccines for humans".

Most of the patients with rabies were children or teenagers, and most contracted the disease after being bitten by a dog, usually on the head and neck.

In the worst-affected province in China, Guandong, 62.5 per cent of patients did not receive proper treatment on their wounds with 92.5 per cent not receiving adequate post-exposure vaccination.