Vet suggests bringing in UN expert to help fight rabies

KUCHING: The Sarawak government has been urged to seek help from Dr Eric Brum the chief technical advisor at Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD) of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

This was suggested by Dr Natasha Lee, board member of Society for Prevention of Cruelty Against Animal (SPCA) Selangor yesterday.

“I can recommend someone from FAO to come there and discuss strategy, his name is Eric Brum. He is based in Bangladesh and is involved rabies control in Bali,” she told the press when asked to comment on the latest increase of rabies infected areas yesterday.

From online sources, Dr Brum is the chief technical advisor for FAO’s Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD) and the current team leader for ECTAD’s Bangladesh programme.

Dr Brum’s involvement in rabies control in Indonesia started after the first cases of rabies in Bali were reported in 2008. Back then, the FAO established a technical assistance project with the Indonesian government to support efforts to control the disease in Bali.

This was to be achieved by establishing an effective programme to coordinate and facilitate rabies control with government agencies and partner organisations. As a result of the programme, human rabies cases were reduced from eleven per month in 2010 to just one per month the following year.

Following a mass vaccination of dogs, there was another major reduction in 2012 and 2013, bringing the number of reported cases down to only one human case in all of 2013.

The model developed in Bali is now being modified to suit circumstances in other affected parts of Indonesia to progressively control and eliminate the virus from the entire country.