Total case of dog bites to humans and seasonal patterns of the bites

Abstract

Dog bites are poorly understood and often underestimated public health problem as it causes huge medico-social problem as these attacks result in millions of injuries and thousands of deaths all over the world due to risk of rabies transmission. Approximately 1 in 20 dogs bite a human being during the dogs’ lifetime. The present study estimated average annual dog bites to humans and indicate seasonal pattern of the bite in Addis Ababa in the year 2008 and 2009. All data on total, stray and owned dog bites to humans are obtained from human rabies post exposure treatment record of the Zoonoses Diseases Research Team in the Ethiopian Health and Nutrition Research Institute. The data used are all dog bite cases in Addis Ababa of the year 2008 and 2009. A seasonal pattern of dog bites are also analyzed from the same data in the study period. Average annual or seasonal dog bites are expressed as a percentage of total cases, or as a mean ± SD and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was applied for seasonal pattern of dog bites. The X2 test was used to determine the statistical significance between stray and owned dog bites. The average value for dog bites was 1097 ± 0.37/year for stray and 400 ± 1.06/year for owned dogs. In both years injuries caused by stray dogs was higher and significantly differed from injuries caused by owned dogs (t= 33.04, p=0.000). The highest average value of total dog bites was observed in the autumn months in 2008 (146.67 ± 0.89) as well in the autumn months for the two years together 281.67 ± 1.71). Mean of bites are significantly different between seasons in both years together (F=13.95, p=0.000).