Welcome Guest   |  Login   |   Signup
JG Logo
Fri, May 25, 2012
Archive Search

Bali Rabies Cases Fall, Alert Status Dropped
Made Arya Kencana | January 23, 2012

Share This Page
1
5
0
0
Share with google+ :


Post a comment
Please login to post comment

Comments

Be the first to write your opinion!

Denpasar. Authorities in Bali have lifted a health alert placed on the island in 2008 as a result of a major rabies outbreak.

Head of Bali’s health agency, Nyoman Sutedja, said the decision was made to lift the alert because of the decline in the number of human rabies cases, both fatal and not-fatal.

“Rabies has now declined to an endemic level and there have been no deaths reported his year,” he said on Monday.

According to health officials on the island, 26 people died of rabies last year, a significant decline from the 83 fatalities the previous year.

While a major improvement, it is still a far cry from the four rabies death the year before the outbreak hit.

The number of dog bites reported to the authorities has also declined, but not to pre-epidemic levels. There were 50,628 bites in 2011, from 67,021 reported bites the previous year. In 2009, 21,806 bites were reported.

Sutedja acknowledged there was still a problem with ensuring that everyone who was bitten by a potentially rabid animal, usually a dog, received a vaccine. In 2011, of the 50,628 bites reported to health authorities, only 47,827 of the victims received the vaccine.

It can be difficult to tell whether an animal has rabies and most bites are from non-infected animals, but if a person is bitten by a rabid animal, the disease is almost always fatal without timely vaccination.

“The people who were not given the vaccine were usually in remote areas that couldn’t be reached by our rabies center, and some of them decided that because their injury was small, they probably weren’t at risk.” Sutedja said.

Authorities have attributed the drop in the number of rabies cases to a program of mass vaccinations of domestic dogs.