New Blueprint for fox rabies control

The Blueprint for Rabies Prevention and Control has been developed to serve as a guide for countries that would like to prevent human rabies by eliminating animal rabies within their borders. It is the result of a collective effort by a large number of rabies experts from ‘Partners for Rabies Prevention’ (PRP), an informal group of stakeholders including, GARC, FAO, OIE, WHO, PAHO, Animal welfare NGOs, Universities, reference laboratories and funders.

 

Initially, the blueprint focused on the control of rabies in dog populations and was launched in late June 2010 facilitated by the FAO Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD), Bamako. Evaluation of its performance indicates that the initiative has had a global impact by providing relevant authorities and personnel in rabies-affected areas with a standard operating procedure (“Blueprint”) to develop their own programs for preventing human rabies through canine rabies elimination.

Now a second module (www.foxrabiesblueprint.org) has been developed and integrated into the website to cover the control of rabies in wildlife populations, specifically in red foxes using oral rabies vaccination (ORV). For decades this methodology has been successfully applied in North America and Western and Central Europe and resulted in virtual elimination of fox mediated rabies.

This Blueprint for Fox Rabies Prevention and Control has been developed by a handful of global rabies experts also from the “Partners for Rabies Prevention”. The initiative coordinated by the Global Alliance for Rabies Control and supported by WHO and OIE aimed at complementing the existing blueprint with a similar guide for controlling or eventually eliminating fox rabies, using the oral rabies vaccination (ORV) strategy. Before being published online the blueprint was critically revised by other rabies experts from North America and Europe including experts involved in fox rabies control projects on the ground. Their effort is greatly acknowledged.

This Blueprint is not meant to replace existing material or national guidelines but rather is meant to serve as an easy to use guide to assist countries in understanding how to prevent and control fox rabies using ORV. It brings together relevant information on rabies prevention from specific international (animal) health organizations, e.g. FAO, OIE, and published data from the field, expert knowledge and includes case reports on effective fox rabies control and elimination. By doing so the blueprint captures state-of-the-art expertise both from both practical and theoretical viewpoints. This is particularly important as with an improved disease status in large parts of Europe and a generation turnover in staff involved in rabies control in Europe there is a risk of expert knowledge being lost.

The fox rabies blueprint is applicable to countries where rabies has been present (endemic) and also for countries where rabies has been re-introduced after a period of absence. The information follows the successful concept of the canine rabies blueprint and is organized in a simple Q&A format and divided into five main sections: (I) Introduction, (II) Roles and Responsibilities, (III) Infrastructure, legislative framework, costs and funding, (IV) Communications plan, (V) Operational activities.

Answers to 154 questions are provided in clear and concise key messages, including links to specific documents and websites for more information if so required, and a section on how to develop a suitable communication strategy for an ORV campaign. The complexity of fox rabies control is illustrated by the fact that 102 questions are related to operational activities. For instance, a large section is devoted to the evaluation of ORV campaigns, including e.g. bait-uptake, seroconversion, herd immunity, surveillance. The Blueprint is a living document in that it will continue to evolve to include all new or modified recommendations as they become available and is therefore much more flexible than traditional printed guidelines. Users are encouraged to send comments for further enlargement of this information tool, to [email protected]

This article was contributed by Thomas Müller and Conrad Freuling of the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute, Germany who lead the development of this resource, on behalf of the PRP group. The blueprint can be accessed through www.rabiesblueprint.com and the fox chapter is available atwww.foxrabiesblueprint.org. The publication on the canine rabies blueprint by Lembo et al (2012) is available here.