Eliminate Rabies from Malawi (The Whole Country!)

Rabies kills at least one child every nine minutes. It's an agonising death and there is no treatment once a person shows symptoms of the disease. If you get bitten by a rabid dog (the cause of 99% of all rabies in humans), the only chance you have is to get to a hospital and receive a course of post exposure vaccinations - which is fine as long as the hospital has them and if you can afford them. Tragically, in the places where rabies is most prevalent, access to treatment is difficult and prohibitvely expensive.

The way to eliminate the disease is by vaccinating the dog populations that carry it. Protect the dogs, protect the people - and it is mainly children that get bitten as they are the ones who come into contact with roaming dogs most. Killing dogs doesn't work - it just creates a vacuum for more dogs to move into an area - but vaccinating the ones there is the way to establish a herd immunity and this technique works! Mission Rabies vaccinated over 35,000 street dogs in Blantyre, Malawi last year (and the year before). Blantyre hospital annually reported the highest incidence of child rabies deaths from any single instutition in the whole of Africa in 2012. This is why we targeted the city. This year it hasn't recorded a single child rabies death.

So let's do this properly - let's eliminate rabies from one of the poorest countries of the world, let's protect hundreds of thousands of dogs and people, let's establish a blueprint for how this disease can be beathen in sub saharan Africa on a national scale and let's do it in the next five years. MSD Animal Health are donating the vaccines, Dogs Trust are supporting 3 states, Mission Rabies are totally fired to make this happen - we just need a bit of cash and a few thousand volunteers!!!

What are you waiting for?!!! LET'S GO!!!!!!!!!!!