As its rabies plan lags, Cambodia feels the bite

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Despite killing some 800 people in the Kingdom each year, rabies has been largely off the public health radar. Plans are in the works for a nationwide response, but can funding catch up?

By Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon and Sonen Soth

 

When her 15-year-old daughter Thai Sopheak was bitten by a dog last month, Kat Soklim took no chances. She had known a man from a nearby village who died following a dog bite the year before, and she wasn’t going to let her daughter suffer the same fate. Sopheak is one of the lucky ones; for the past month, she has been leaving her village in Kampong Cham’s Prey Chhor district every few days at 6 in the morning to head to Phnom Penh. Her destination is the Pasteur Institute’s vaccination centre, where she can get postexposure rabies treatment against the otherwise incurable virus.

 

Rabies, which is known as chkae chkuot or “mad dog” disease in Khmer, has a 100 percent fatality rate if a patient isn’t vaccinated before the disease takes hold, and it is estimated to kill as many as 800 people – disproportionately children – each year in the Kingdom. Nonetheless, there is currently no national programme to address the disease, and a lack of resources persists when it comes to vaccinating both people and animals. “It’s years late,” Dr Ly Sowath, who is in charge of the rabies vaccination centre at the Pasteur Institute, said of a nationwide rabies strategy.

 

LONG ANALYSIS TO BE READ HERE http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/its-rabies-plan-lags-cambodia-feels-bite

 

 

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