On the eve of World Anti-rabies Day, Dr Ranjit Mankeshwar,said that lack of awareness about rabies results in the death of at least 20,000 victims of dog bite.
Harishchandra Gupta, 28, a resident of Vashind village near Asangaon, died in January this year at Nair Hospital, exactly three months after a rabid dog bit him. Gupta developed hydrophobia, an extreme fear of water, which is a symptom in the last stage of rabies and even attacked his family members and doctors who tried to treat him. According to doctors at Nair Hospital, Gupta’s death could have been easily averted had he been given anti-rabies vaccination on time. Instead, Gupta visited a quack in his village who prescribed some local herbs as treatment.
On the eve of World Anti-rabies Day, Dr Ranjit Mankeshwar, associate professor of Preventive and Social Medicine at JJ Hospital, said that lack of awareness about rabies and the importance of anti-rabies vaccination results in the death of at least 20,000 victims of dog bite in the country every year.
According to the Association for Prevention and Control of Rabies in India (APCRI), of the 17.4 million dog bite cases in a year in India, more than 50 per cent are children. The clinic at JJ Hospital, apart from offering free vaccination to poor patients, also organises educational programmes for the public as well as for general physicians. “Victims of dog bites, particularly from rural areas, are wrongly prescribed lime and turmeric powder as treatment. Sometimes patients simply ignore the wound,” said Dr Mankeshwar, whose team at JJ Hospital sees 250 new patients per month.
The incubation period for the rabies virus generally varies from 20 days to 40 days. “However, there have been documented instances where a victim has developed the symptoms as early as four days after an animal bite, or even as late as four years after the bite,” Dr Mankeshwar said.
The union government has banned the manufacture and use of the extremely painful nervous tissue vaccine since 2005. “The modern tissue culture vaccine costs Rs300 per dose,” a resident doctor at Nair Hospital said. “However, this vaccine is often in short supply and patients have to wait for several days to get the injection,” a doctor from Sion Hospital said.
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