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Episode #126 - Rabies: Protect yourself and your pets [1]

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Date: 2024-09

VGS Hello and welcome to Science in 5. This is Orion and that's Daft Punk. Orion has been a street dog as well as a pet. But the most important thing about Orion is that he's vaccinated against rabies. We're talking about rabies with Bernadette. Bernadette, what's the most important thing that people should remember about rabies?



BA Rabies kills. We have very good vaccines both for animals and for humans, so we should put them to use. We can prevent rabies. We can prevent the bite. And we can use our vaccines to protect us.



VGS Bernadette what is rabies? And just how serious a disease is this?



BA So rabies kills. It kills the human. It kills the animal. Usually that happens rather quickly within ten days. Rabies is a viral disease, and it is spread mostly through the bites of dogs and actually other mammals. But the dogs are the principal, source of rabies for human infection. Other mammals can be infected. There's a whole diversity of different viruses.

So we often think about the bat, for example. But most of the human cases are transmitted by dogs. The scary thing about rabies is that it's fatal. If you start showing symptoms, you die.



VGS Sounds really serious. So talk to us about how we can prevent rabies.

BA The very first thing is you can avoid bites, animal bites in general. You know, feeding animals that you don't know. You should avoid that. Petting animals, which you don't know.

You should avoid that. Playing with puppies when there's a mom and she's not looking very happy. You should avoid that. If we know how to behave around animals, if we can understand what they are telling us through their body language, we can actually avoid bites.

And the best audience for this are the ones that are most affected by rabies, and those are children. So when we implement school programs around, you know how to behave around animals hygiene with animals, that is the audience we need to speak to. And that also nurtures responsible animal ownership, which is actually the underlying need in most places. If you have an animal, you have a responsibility to care for it and also to provide it with the health care it needs.



VGS Bernadette growing up in India I was bitten twice by street dogs. One of them was, a dog that had newborn pups and was very protective about them. And after I was bitten, I received 14 injections in my abdomen, which was very painful. How have vaccines changed since then?



BA The vaccine you got as a child, that is an outdated vaccine. It's called nerve tissue vaccine.

We do not use it anymore. WHO has stopped recommending this vaccine for decades already. There is a new vaccine which is, very safe and effective and not painful. It is administered in the shoulder as with many other vaccines, and can protect you against rabies. You can use vaccines after a bite to protect you against developing rabies.

And that's, as I said, sort of fighting the virus by racing it to the brain so our body can build immunity before the virus reaches the brain. You won't develop rabies. The other way is many people work with animals or work in laboratories or travel to exotic places where they may be exposed to rabies. In that case, you can also have vaccination to protect you in advance of any type of exposure being a bite or other.



VGS When you're bitten, what should be your next steps?



BA Wash the wound for 15 minutes with soap and water, very simple. That is so important because you'll be washing away the virus from the wound, which will clean the wound.

That helps to wash away the virus. If you're in an endemic area, then you should also seek medical advice so that they can assess whether you need vaccines and the sooner you can do this, the better.



VGS Very good. So if you're a pet owner or even if you are around street dogs, things to remember is vaccinate the dogs and the animals if you can. And then prevent bites as much as you can.



BA 60,000 people still die of rabies. 40% of those are mostly children. So it's still very present.

We should also remember that we have very powerful tools. We've got vaccines that are so powerful, it can protect us and our animals from rabies. But most of all, we can also prevent the bites because that is the source of rabies. So if we learn how to behave with animals, we can already prevent bites which will never go away. But we can also prevent rabies.



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[1] Url: https://www.who.int/podcasts/episode/science-in-5/episode--126---rabies--protect-yourself-and-your-pets

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