New Partnership Aims to bring Rabies Relief to Africa

26 Sep 2014

  • Pan-African Rabies Control Network (PARACON) will support control efforts across continent
  • Remit covers data reporting, improved diagnosis and expansion of best practice measures
  • Sunday 28 September is World Rabies Day

Geneva, Switzerland, 26 September 2014 – Efforts to control the spread of rabies on the African continent received a boost today with the launch of a new network aimed at deploying the latest scientific, educational and policy interventions to control the world’s most fatal disease.

Over half of the tens of thousands of people who die of rabies every year come from Africa. Victims succumb to extremely painful and harrowing deaths as a result of inaccurate diagnosis or lack of access to basic lifesaving medicine.

In response to this growing human and animal health crisis, the Global Alliance for Rabies Control (GARC) has launched the Pan-African Rabies Control Network (PARACON), a new venture that will support efforts to eliminate the disease across the entire continent.

The new network replaces two existing, regional bodies, the Southern and Eastern African Rabies Group (SEARG) and African Rabies Expert Bureau (AfroREB), which focused on North and West Africa. It also covers countries not previously covered by either of these bodies.

“Rabies is a global disease which requires a global response. Coordinating all efforts in Africa through PARaCoN enables us not only to spread best practice across the whole continent and achieve economies of scale but also vastly improve our ability to collect reliable data, which to date has really hampered efforts to bring the disease under control,” said Professor Louis Nel, Executive Director, GARC.

One best practice the Network will champion is the One Health approach that is used by GARC; bringing experts from the human and animal health worlds together with other stakeholders such as educationalists to apply a holistic approach to tackling the disease.

PARaCoN will build upon the objectives and initiatives of previous regional networks to:

  1. Find solutions to rabies in Africa, focused on rabies elimination
  2. Disseminate and share information and experience relevant to rabies control,
  3. Improve rabies data reporting
  4. Improve medical diagnosis and knowledge 
  5. Promote governmental support of rabies elimination programmes

A first meeting of the new network will be held from 11th-13th February 2015 in Durban,* South Africa. The main topics for discussion will be data sharing and dissemination, improving governmental support, optimal rabies control strategies and their roll-out and planning the way forward for PARACON.

*The ongoing impact of the Ebola epidemic has forced us to postpone this meeting. The new dates are 9th - 11th June, 2015 in Gauteng, South Africa. See the PARACON website for more details.

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