There’s a line of dogs on leads, or being held by their owners. One by one they get an injection. It’s an injection that may save them from a slow and painful death. There are no French bulldogs or cockapoos or labradoodles here. These are the dogs of a village in rural Tanzania getting their rabies vaccination. Over the course of a typical day’s vaccination campaign several hundred dogs may get their jab – and even a handful of cats and kittens.
Ayubu Nnko with a recently vaccinated dog
The vaccinations are the work of a grassroots rabies social entrepreneur, Ayubu Nnko. He’s a softly spoken Tanzanian with a background in journalism, and a project management and business administration graduate who stumbled into rabies vaccination around 10 years ago. He met a gunmen walking around one of these villages shooting the dogs, on the suspicion they might have rabies. When a rabies case occurred children were locked up and couldn’t go to school as a precaution. He was appalled.
Rabies is not like Covid-19. It can only be transmitted by saliva or blood. It is dog bites that typically spread rabies. The animal foam at the mouth and go rabid, and bite anything they come across. That is usually how humans get rabies – through a dog attack. Rabies is a particularly nasty disease because the dogs who contract it become very violent and have a fear of water. People who get rabies have hallucinations and can’t drink water. Once the symptoms of rabies show, there are no treatments. It’s a horrible way to die. It means fear of contracting rabies, is often as big a problem as the disease itself, which is why people take the drastic step of randomly shooting dogs.
The actual rabies vaccination is quick and painless
Rabies is also not like Covid-19, because rabies has one of the oldest and most effective vaccines known. Back in 1885 (yes 140 years ago) Louise Pasteur injected a 9-year-old boy with his new rabies vaccine and it saved his life. But if rabies is the oldest vaccine – why are dogs and people still being infected with it?
The reason for that is complicated. It isn’t because the vaccine is expensive: maybe £1 a dog. Indeed people are typically not even vaccinated – their animals are. Rabies persists because it’s nobody’s focus of attention, because the vaccine’s protection only last for a year or two, and perhaps because the real sufferers are dogs not people. It’s also poverty and lack of understanding about the disease that contribute to the problem.
But Ayubu Nnko has made it his mission to change that in one small province of rural Tanzania where rabies cases were particularly bad. He started by asking his friends not to buy him a beer but pay for a rabies vaccination. Since 2019 he has been getting funds from a small grant-maker I am a trustee of. He and his team have vaccinated so far over 6000 dogs, and the results are impressive. Cases of rabies in the Mkalama district have reduced from 180 over 6 months to just 2 or 3. Vaccination rates need to be at around 70% of dogs to stop or slow transmission rates.
Even cats & kittens get vaccinated
Alongside the vaccinations Ayubu and his team at Education for African Animals Welfare (EAAW) have been running education campaigns in the areas where they do vaccinations. So locals understand how vaccinations work; that villagers need to vaccinate their cats as well as their dogs; that a hungry dog wanders looking for food and may meet hyaenas or other animals carrying the disease, and that caring for their pets is the best way of reducing the chances of them catching rabies.
Ayubu grew up in poverty in Manyara in the northern part of Tanzania near Lake Manyara National Park, the fourth born among 8 children. His parents could only afford enough for staple meals. He remembers walking 13 Kilometres to school so he could save the bus fare for his school fees. He realised early on that he would need to work hard and save like crazy, if he was to get a good education. So he worked in a variety of restaurants day and night. As a result of his hard work, he managed to educate himself, and pay for his siblings school fees and support his parents with medical expenses and other needs.
I have known Ayubu for 5 years now. I met him when my wife sat next to him at a Dogs Trust conference, and they started chatting. My huge admiration for him and his work comes from the fact that he has created the rabies campaigns himself, from the bottom up. There are no western agencies coming in with dozens of volunteers, or pots of money, to do mass vaccination campaigns. Dogs Trust International have recently helped with a vehicle and other costs, but he has to find the cost of the vaccines and accessories elsewhere. I don’t think there are even many examples of grassroots rabies campaigns that he could copy. He saw a need to vaccinate dogs, rather than shoot them, to help reduces human and animal suffering, and he made it happen from the bottom up, in one small part of Tanzania.
Waiting in the queue for a rabies vaccination
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