Recent Research, July 2016

Laboratory Diagnosis

Disinfection protocols for necropsy equipment in rabies laboratories: Safety of personnel and diagnostic outcome. None of the disinfectants tested proved to be effective at destroying virus and viral RNA under label conditions. The results indicate that an effective disinfection protocol should be carefully validated to guarantee staff safety and reliability of the results obtained from molecular diagnostic tests.

Evaluation of Six Commercially Available Rapid Immunochromatographic Tests for the Diagnosis of Rabies in Brain Material. Easy-to-use tests, such as lateral flow devices (LFD), may increase surveillance and improve control efforts. Using field samples, six commercially available LFDs produced sensitivities between 0% up to 100% depending on the LFD and the samples, while for experimentally infected animals the maximum sensitivity was 32%. None of the tests investigated proved to be satisfactory, with a high number of false negatives and batch-to-batch variation found.

Surveillance

Prevalence of Dog Bites in Rural and Urban Slums of Delhi: A Community-based Study. A house-to-house survey revealed dog bite incidence rates of 30.1/1000 in urban slums and 19.6/1000 in rural slums over the last year. Two-fifths of the dog bite patients did not wash the wound with soap and water, one-fifth of the patients did not receive anti-rabies vaccine, and most did not receive anti-rabies serum.

The incidence of jackal bites and injuries in the Zagreb anti rabies clinic during the 1995-2014 period. 18,094 patients were bitten by various animals, but only 2 cases were caused by jackals, one of which was imported (from France). Jackal bites and injuries are exceptionally low, and it is justified that these are classified in the group of 'other animals' when officially reported.

Probable Rabies Virus Transmission through Organ Transplantation, China, 2015. In July 2015, physicians in Beijing, diagnosed rabies in 2 patients who had each received a kidney from a common organ donor who had died from acute progressive encephalitis of unknown cause. The patients had rabies incubation periods of 42 and 48 days and both went into a deep coma within 80 days, before dying. Two other recipients received corneas but remained well after receiving timely rabies prophylaxis.

Epidemiology

Revealing spatio-temporal patterns of rabies spread among various categories of animals in the Republic of Kazakhstan, 2010-2013. Outbreak clusters were detected by spatial statistics and used to calculate the basic reproductive ratio, R0. For farm animals, the value of R0 was 1.62 (1.11-2.26) and for wild animals 1.84 (1.08-3.13), while it was close to 1 for domestic animals (dogs and cats). These results were used to design recommendations for control measures.

Zoning the territory of the Republic of Kazakhstan as to the risk of rabies among various categories of animals. This paper presents the zoning of the territory of the Republic of Kazakhstan with respect to the risk of rabies outbreaks in domestic and wild animals considering environmental and climatic conditions, based on the national database of rabies outbreaks in Kazakhstan in the period 2003-2014.

Travel-Associated Rabies in Pets and Residual Rabies Risk, Western Europe. In 2015, countries in Western Europe were declared free of rabies in nonflying mammals. Surveillance data for 2001-2013 indicate that risk for residual rabies is not 0 because of pet importation from countries with enzootic rabies. However, the risk is so low (7.52 × 10^-10) that it probably can be considered negligible.

Expert Opinion to Identify High-Risk Entry Routes of Canine Rabies into Papua New Guinea. A structured, in-country expert-elicitation workshop identified the highest risk routes for entry of dogs - associated with the movement of people - into PNG from canine rabies-endemic countries.  Twenty entry routes were identified with the highest risk ones being three land routes from Papua, Indonesia and two sea routes involved in fishing and logging trade.

 

Dog ecology and vaccination

Dog Ecology and Barriers to Canine Rabies Control in the Republic of Haiti, 2014-2015. An epidemiologic survey of dog owners found that over 50% of owned dogs were allowed to roam freely, and > 80% of dog owners reported barriers to accessing rabies vaccination for their dogs. Nearly one-third of the dog population evaluated in this study died in the year preceding the survey (32%), and 18% of these deaths were clinically consistent with rabies. More than 3% of the study population had been bitten within the year preceding the survey.

Free-Roaming Dogs in Nepal: Demographics, Health and Public Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices. In central Nepal, dog owners regularly fed free-roaming dogs but provided minimal health care, and 42% of respondents did not claim ownership of the dog for which they provided care. Following rabies vaccination, 97% of dogs maintained an adequate antibody titre for ≥6 months. Most dogs appeared healthy, although many had parasites (correlated with poor skin condition), and puppy mortality was 60%.

Risk factors associated with non-vaccination rabies status of dogs in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Husbandry practices, rabies knowledge, geographical area/location, and the ages of dogs were important factors associated with the risk of non-vaccination. Dog owners reported being more likely to vaccinate their dogs when vaccination was free (52%) and available less than 1 km from their homes (91%). The data showed that 70% vaccination coverage was not reached in the surveyed dog population.

 

Post Exposure Prophylaxis

Rabies Suspected Animal Contact Cases in a City with Animal Husbandry and the Appropriateness of Prophylactic Procedures. Of 515 cases treated in the emergency room from August 2012 and December 2013, 44.7% were administered inappropriate prophylaxis. Thirty-seven percent of cases received less rabies Ig than recommended, despite category 3 contact, and some were given unnecessary rabies Ig or vaccine.

A Comparative Study on the Adverse Reactions of Purified Chick Embryo Cell Vaccine (PCECV) and Purified Vero Cell Rabies Vaccine (PVRV). In a clinical trial, 1449 people bitten by animals received 5 intramuscular injections of the PVRV or PCECV vaccines. The most common local adverse reaction in both groups was pain at the injection site (4%). Most of the reported systemic adverse reactions were headache (2.5%) and fever (1.9%) in PCECV and PVRV group, respectively, and these were not significantly different. The incidence of itching was significantly higher in the PVRV group compared to the PCECV group (1% vs. 0.1%).