Australian vets have been warned to be vigilant about the threat of rabies in remote northern Australia, as an outbreak continues to concern experts in eastern Indonesia.
It has been four months since rabies was confirmed on the Indonesian island of Bali, and four people have since died after being bitten by infected dogs.
As soon as the outbreak was detected, AusAID funding was provided for diagnostic kits and a round of mass vaccinations for dogs.
But what worries Australian vets is the lack of emergency planning in Indonesia, and the threat that rabies could spread to northern Australia.
The disease is thought to have come from the eastern island of Flores, where people eat dogs, on a boat bringing fish to sell in Bali.
When rabies was confirmed Indonesia had no emergency response system so Australia stepped in. In part that was through self interest; to keep rabies out of Australia.
Helen Scott-Orr is running an aid project for the Australian government agency ACIAR (The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research) to improve veterinary services in the eastern islands.
She says it’s a challenge in the decentralised democracy of Indonesia.
“AusAID provided, through my project, $100,000 of emergency assistance,” she said.
“Bali didn’t even have a rabies diagnostic capacity at that time. We were able to purchase a fluorescence microscope very quickly in Australia and get it brought up straight after Christmas and part of the money went for training programs on how to do the diagnosis in the labs and that was applied not only for Bali but for the whole of Indonesia.”
Around $25,000 of the money was pumped into emergency assistance to roll out vaccinations for all the dogs on the island.
Before that there was an even more pressing concern; almost no-one on the island was vaccinated, including people who needed to treat dogs.
“That human vaccine is very, very expensive and luckily it was provided through the Indonesian Government,” Dr Scott-Orr said.
So far four Balinese have died from rabid dog bites and 10 more local deaths are under investigation. Young children are most vulnerable because they might not report bites.
“Once you’re bitten by a rabid dog if you don’t soon clean the wound and have at least three shots of an effective vaccine, then the virus makes its way up the nerves to the brain,” Dr Scott-Orr said.
“Once it makes its way into the brain and clinical signs are caused it’s almost certain death. You might go for two or three months after being bitten but once you get the symptoms it’s too late.”
Control dogs, control rabies
Dr Agung Putra from the Disease Investigation Centre in Denpasar is grateful to Australia for the financial assistance.
“At the end of 2008 we were at the end of financing… In Indonesia we do not have any emergency budget system,” said the doctor, who has five healthy vaccinated dogs of his own.
Those dogs are just a fraction of the 20,000 in the area that have been vaccinated after a rabid dog was found near the Centre.
Rabies only really strikes dogs. It can also be found in monkeys and cats but this is in very small numbers.
In theory this means the disease is quite easy to control because if you can stop the disease in dogs you can stop the disease spreading to people.
“The problem is how to vaccinate the dogs. The problem in Bali especially is that we estimate we have about 450,000 dogs over the island,” Dr Agung said.
Around 95 per cent of the dogs are part of the massive stray population on the island.
In fact when Dr Agung’s staff had to cull dogs on the Bukit peninsula where the tourist resorts are, they did it with high-dose strychnine darts shot from blow-pipes while riding as passengers on motorbikes.
No Australian money was used to put down Balinese dogs. As it was the Balinese animal welfare organisation camped out on Dr Agung’s steps calling for an end to the cull. But all is quiet for now.
“Most of the animals show critical signs within six months. It (the rabies outbreak) has been going now for four months so we are still observing and all the dogs here have been vaccinated,” Dr Agung said.
He is travelling to Darwin next week to talk about the rabies experience in Bali at the Australian veterinary conference. Dr Scott-Orr says he must be listened to.
“Thinking of the situation in remote northern Australia, there would be a lot of communities where children are playing with dogs unrestrained,” she said.
“If rabies got into those communities it would cause mayhem.”
