Toll of 307 is magnitudes of order less than alleged by global organizations
NEW DELHI, India––The bad news from Singh Baghel, Indian minister of state for health and family welfare, is that rabies killed 307 people in India in 2022, the highest confirmed death toll according to Central Bureau of Health Intelligence data since rabies killed 361 people in India in 2006, and an almost sixfold increase from just 55 rabies deaths in all of India in 2021.
At least 294 of the 307 deaths are believed to have resulted directly from the bites of rabid dogs. Other rabid animals may have caused the remainder.
(Mission Rabies photo from video in Goa.)
Mission Rabies making a difference
The good news, if 307 deaths from rabies can be considered good news in any context, is that the confirmed body count from rabies in India is still many magnitudes of order below the highly exaggerated claims of the Global Alliance for Rabies Control, and numbers often amplified by the World Health Organization, in disregard––for the past 20 years––of actual WHO-funded findings.
Further good news is that the data Baghel disclosed to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament, appears to project marked progress in reducing the rabies death toll worldwide through vaccination campaigns led by Mission Rabies, the principal program of the British organization World Veterinary Services.
(Mission Rabies photo)
60,000 dogs vaccinated in 30 days just for starters
Active in India since vaccinating 60,000 dogs in 30 days in 2013 as a demonstration project, Mission Rabies also has vaccination programs in several African nations with high reported rabies death tolls, and on June 8, 2023 announced that it had vaccinated 74,872 dogs in a ten-day sweep of Pnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia.
(See Mission Rabies vaccinates 60,000 dogs in 10 Indian cities in 30 days.)
Summarized The Times of India, “According to the World Health Organization, India accounts for 36% of all global deaths due to rabies, which is transmitted through the saliva or bite of an infected animal. The World Health Organization also estimates that India accounts for 65% of the deaths due to rabies in the South-East Asia region.”
(Mission Rabies photo)
Global rabies toll just 853?
If 307 is 36% of the global rabies death toll, the global toll would be just 853.
The Indian states with the most rabies deaths in 2022 were the National Capital Territory of Delhi, 48; West Bengal, 38; and Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh, each with 29.
In each state the toll rose steeply from those of recent years, mostly likely because of disruptions to the Indian national Animal Birth Control program resulting from diversions of funding and vaccination personnel to fighting COVID 19.
The numbers reported by the Central Bureau of Health Intelligence, which is the Indian equivalent of the data-collecting arm of U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, are in conflict with projections from the National Rabies Control Programme, created by the central government of India in March 2023.
(Mission Rabies Photo)
Other Indian agencies use different numbers, based on estimates
The National Rabies Control Programme at that time reported “6,644 clinically suspected cases and deaths of human rabies between 2012 and 2022,” more than four times the Central Bureau of Health Intelligence total of 1,490 for the same time frame.
But even the National Rabies Control Programme number, which projects to 664 human rabies fatalities per year, resulting from about 17 million total dog bites, is a tiny fraction of the numbers thrown around by the Global Alliance for Rabies Control and World Health Organization.
Yet another Indian agency, the National Centre for Disease Control, continues to allege, based on the Global Alliance for Rabies Control and World Health Organization claims, that “The number of human deaths globally due to dog-mediated rabies is estimated to be 59,000 annually.”
This has likely never been even close to true.
Chinese study found GARC & WHO claims were exaggerated
The International Journal of Infectious Diseases, published by the International Society for Infectious Diseases and affiliated with the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases [ProMED–Mail], on November 4, 2022 took a gigantic step toward setting the record straight, publishing a study by 13 leading Chinese rabies researchers who affirmed––as third-party investigators having “no dog in the fight”–– that claims of from 55,000 to 60,000 human rabies deaths per year have no foundation in current medical and scientific data.
The Chinese study is accessible at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijid.2022.10.046.
The study citation is “Gan H, Hou X, Wang Y, et al. Global burden of rabies in 204 countries and territories, from 1990 to 2019: Results from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. Int J Infect Dis. 2022.”
Chinese study projected 13,744 rabies deaths worldwide
The Chinese team found only 13,744 human rabies deaths likely to have occurred worldwide in 2010.
Further, the Chinese researchers discovered that the 10 nations “with the highest human rabies age-standardized incidence rate in 2019” were Nepal, Myanmar, Niger, Ghana, Chad, Mali, Somalia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Pakistan.
(See New study finds: India rabies deaths & therefore world toll far exaggerated.)
Semple & Harvey, 1911
India, often alleged to account for the majority of human rabies deaths worldwide, is nowhere on the list––exactly as ANIMALS 24-7 has repeatedly reported, since discovering in 2012 that every estimate of human rabies deaths in India published between 1911 and 2003 appeared to have been derived by multiplying the findings from a 1911 survey of Indian government hospitals done by post-exposure rabies vaccination pioneers Sir David Semple and Major William F. Harvey.
In other words, each published estimate of the Indian rabies death toll was the Semple and Harvey estimate projected up to whatever the Indian human population was at the time each new estimate was done.
Semple had in 1904 invented the nerve tissue culture post-exposure anti-rabies vaccine used worldwide for more than 90 years, working at the Pasteur Institute at Kasauli. This facility is now called the Central Research Institute.
Actual year-by-year confirmed rabies deaths in India:
2003: 235 (M.K. Sudarshan study, funded by World Health Organization) 2005: 274 (Central Bureau of Health Intelligence, as are all totals below) 2006: 361
2007: 221 2008: 244 2009: 260 2010: 162 2011: 233 2012: 212 2013: 132 2014: 125 2015: 113 2016: 86 2017: 97 2018: 116 2019 105 2020: 92 2021: 55 2022: 307
TOTAL: 3,430, or an average of 180 per year.
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Sharing with gratitude. Not at all surprised at the direction of these findings in light of the shift in focus from wide to narrow.