'One Health' surveillance tool proves vital in rapid response to potentially deadly rabies outbreak in India

New Delhi: The use of an animal rescue system proved to be a vital "One Health" surveillance tool as part of a rapid response to a potentially deadly rabies outbreak in Pune city, a study has found.

The research, published in the journal CABI One Health to coincide with World Rabies Day on September 28, highlights how tools—such as Hawk Data Pro—can be "modified or adapted to other areas" and help eradicate rabies around the world.

Robust and widely implementable "One Health" surveillance systems are needed to detect and control the spread of zoonotic infectious diseases including rabies, said Abi Tamim Vanak, lead author of the research from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), in Bengaluru.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the true burden of rabies in India is not fully known but the researchers said disease is believed to cause up to 20,000 deaths every year.

Dogs are the source of the vast majority of human rabies deaths, contributing up to 99 per cent of all transmissions to humans. Between 30 to 60 per cent of reported cases and deaths in India occur in children under the age of 15. This is because bites that occur in children often go unrecognised and unreported, the researchers said.

However, rabies is a vaccine-preventable viral disease which occurs in more than 150 countries and territories, they said.

"Using technological tools coupled with a rapid field response and rapid diagnostics can help in the surveillance of deadly diseases such as rabies, even in densely populated urban areas," Vanak said.

"We show that the adoption of the Hawk Data Pro system as a passive surveillance tool allowed us to document an ongoing outbreak of rabies in a large metropolis in India," he added.

The researcher noted that such systems can be modified or adapted to other areas as well to meet the surveillance and reporting requirements of the WHO's Zeroby30 strategy to eliminate rabies globally.

The team used a webline and helpline that reported injured or sick animals to an animal rescue facility to determine possible rabies cases in street animals in Pune city.

Suspected rabid animals were tested using lateral flow assays and this information was used to direct awareness materials on rabies as well as in conducting mass dog vaccinations in areas that reported multiple cases.

Over a four-year period, the scientists received nearly 91,000 calls or reports of which 1,162 were for suspected rabies cases in dogs, and six for other animals including cats, goats and cattle. Of these, 749 dogs and four other animals tested positive for rabies.