Assessment of the Availability of Public Health Veterinary Services towards Rabies, Namibia 2020

Abstract

Background: Rabies is a neglected zoonotic viral disease that occurs worldwide expects Antarctica. Rabies is an endemic throughout the world and they mostly affect poor and vulnerable population who live in remote areas. Death is rarely reported and human vaccine and immunoglobulins exist for rabies, however they are not accessible to the needy people. About 60 000 people die per year mostly in Africa. Domestic animal especially dogs are responsible for transmission of the virus through bites, scratches or saliva. Clinical symptoms may include unexplained tingling, fever, headache, and confusion. As the virus spreads to the central nervous system fatal inflammation of the spinal cord and brain develops. Rabies cause short and long term illness such as paralytic, hydrophobia. Methods: a scoping reviewed and data were collected from five databases namely: PubMed central, biomedical central, HINARI, Google scholar and EBS Cohost. Only articles from 2010-2020 were used and only ten articles were search or meet the objectives of the study. Results: The studies conducted revealed that more effort was done on delivering vaccine to the communities, the educational campaigns were done accordingly. Although educational programs were provided and other public health services it’s discovered that 74% of dog’s owners expressed their knowledge and 24% have never heard about rabies and never took their dogs for vaccine. Conclusion: Local vaccination campaign should make an effort to eliminate the spread of rabies between dogs and human, dog to dogs. Awareness campaign and educational programs should focus more on providing the right and updated information in order to reduce the spread of rabies in human and dogs. In a view of the Public Health importance of rabies, the government, NGOs and community people need to put more effort on the prevention and controlling rabies by making sure dogs are vaccinated against rabies, dog’s owners are given all the information on rabies so that they can help meet the government halfway on fighting rabies.