World Rabies Day Celebrates 5 years

September 28, 2011 marked the five year anniversary of the World Rabies Day Campaign; the single largest concerted effort to raise global awareness about rabies and its prevention. Recently the WRD team administered a survey in four languages to evaluate the 2011 effort and guide planning for the 2012 campaign. Over 500 surveys were returned and analyzed, providing a wealth of knowledge about the 2011 campaign and suggestions on how to improve various aspects of the WRD campaign. The top 5 requests for WRD 2012 were more webinars, more materials, more videos and photos, more vaccine and more funding. Thank you to everyone who responded to the WRD survey.

Around the world 860 individual events were reported from 115 countries helping to educate more than 32.7 million people. This was accomplished primarily through mass media including television broadcasts, radio shows and newspaper articles as well as conferences and seminars, school-based education and outreach programs, parades, concerts, fun runs and walks, dog shows and animal adopt-a-thons. Animal wellness clinics, including workshops for livestock, held in conjunction with WRD 2011 resulted in 3.1 million vaccinations, and 337,459 microchip implants. These programs were successfully carried out at animal hospitals, humane organizations, veterinary colleges, community offices and field-based venues all over the world.

Since the inaugural campaign in 2007, rabies vaccination clinics held for WRD have helped protect an estimated 7.7 million animals and the total number of people estimated to have been educated through WRD from 2007-2011 has
now reached 182 million. These remarkable feats would not be possible without the support of our global
community and the World Rabies Day team would like to genuinely thank all our followers, advocates, sponsors and outreach partners that have supported the campaign since 2007. Your leadership and willingness to innovate have built a lasting foundation for future successful and sustainable rabies control programs. We hope you will continue to support our efforts into the future as we explore new and novel ways of raising even more awareness to ensure that governments, policy makers and key opinion leaders can no longer neglect rabies.

Contributed by Peter Costa, coordinator of the World Rabies Day campaign.