PH needs M for rabies elimination

The government is short of its target to vaccinate even just for the 70 percent of the country's dog population as its budget for the program is only R30 million instead of the required R400 million.

Joy Lagayan of Bureau of Animal Industry's (BAI) animal disease control division said that more than R400 million is needed until 2020 for the "full-blown" implementation of the government's rabies elimination project.

This, accoding to her, should fund vaccine procurement and additional vaccinators.

With roughly 250 Filipinos dying of rabies yearly, rabies continues to be a serious public health concern in the Philippines with animal vaccination considered as the most effective way of eliminating the disease.

As of now, BAI is only using the balance of nearly R70 million worth of support it received from the Department of Health (DOH) last year.

Next year, the agency is expecting a budget of only R20 to R30 million for this agenda alone.

And as per Lagayan, "that's not even sufficient to buy the vaccines."

"We're still working on increasing the budget for the next years," she further said.

The number of dogs in the Philippines right now is estimated to be around 10 percent of the human population, which means there could be more than 10 million dogs here right now.

In its overall target, the government wants the Philippines to be free from rabbies cases by 2020, as ambitious as it may sound.

After all, such goal is patterned from the ASEAN target of rabies freedom by 2020.

BAI launched this week the “Rabies Free 2020” app, a Pinoy android phone application developed through the collaborative efforts of BAI and the Technological Institute of the Philippines (TIP), in line with the bureau’s commitment to safeguard public health through the control and elimination of animal rabies in the country.

This application aimed to strengthen the rabies awareness campaign through useful information on the facts about rabies, location of animal bite treatment centers, location of animal rabies diagnostic laboratories, and contact information needed by the public.

To date, provinces with the highest reported animal rabies cases from 2016 and 2017 include Pampanga, Pangasinan, Cebu, Iloilo, South Cotabato, Misamis Oriental, Zamboanga City, Bataan, Bulacan, Davao del Sur and Metro Manila. (MBM)