Abstract
Ethiopia has one of the highest incidence levels of human rabies in Africa, with 3–7 deaths per 100,000 people annually. The country has no official rabies control programme, despite the availability of an effective canine vaccine to control rabies. To support effective rabies control, an understanding of the factors affecting dog owners' voluntary intentions to vaccinate their dogs is important. As such, this study examined factors influencing dog owners' intentions to vaccinate their dogs using the constructs of health belief theory. In this cross-sectional study, a questionnaire, designed based on the Health Belief Model constructs was completed by 249 dog owners in 9 randomly selected wards of Bishoftu town in central Ethiopia between October and December 2016. An ordinal regression model was then fitted to explore factors which best predict the likelihood of a dog owner's intention. A classification and regression tree (CART) model was then used for recursive partitioning of the Likert scale in the significant variables to distinctively classify ordinal categories of vaccination intention. Participants' preventive intention was associated with the six constructs of the Health Belief Model: perceived susceptibility, readiness to action, self-efficacy, perceived threat, benefits, and barriers. Dog owner's knowledge about rabies was found to be positively associated with intention to vaccinate, whereas distance from vaccination centers and difficulty of dog transportation were found to be negatively associated to intention to vaccinate. Distance from vaccination center was found to be the best predictor for the intention to vaccinate. The results of this study have policy implications for controlling rabies including increasing dog owners' knowledge about rabies, locating vaccination centers at shorter distances from dog populations and providing suitable means to transport dogs to vaccination centers.
Highlights
Rabies is a viral disease caused by a negative-stranded RNA virus of the genus Lyssavirus in the family Rhabdoviridae, order Mononegavirales [1]
The largest proportion of the estimated economic loss of 8.6 billion USD per year is due to premature death, followed by direct costs incurred in post-exposure prophylaxis and lost income whilst seeking post-exposure prophylaxis, with only limited costs to the veterinary sector due to dog vaccination, and additional costs due to livestock losses [2]
This study aims to identify factors influencing dog rabies vaccination behavior among dog owners in the urban district of Bishoftu in Ethiopia using constructs of the Health Belief theory
Summary
Rabies is a viral disease caused by a negative-stranded RNA virus of the genus Lyssavirus in the family Rhabdoviridae, order Mononegavirales [1]. It is a fatal disease largely transmitted to humans by bites from infected animals—predominantly from domestic dogs. Canine-mediated rabies causes about 60,000 human deaths/ per year, of which 24,000 are contributed by African cases. The most effective strategy available to prevent rabies in humans and livestock is preventive vaccination of dogs [3, 4]. The effectiveness of rabies control through dog vaccination relies on vaccinating a sufficient proportion of the dog population [5]
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