Mission Rabies, a charity dedicated to eliminating rabies worldwide, has launched a new campaign “The Final Rabies Generation” to raise awareness and funding for their dog vaccination programme.

The charity vaccinates dogs because 99% of all human rabies cases are caused by an infected dog bite.

Mass-culling of dogs doesn’t work, and is desperately cruel – but by vaccinating them, it is possible to establish herd immunity, break the rate of transmission and save the lives of innocent children every single day.

Because there is already an effective vaccine, Mission Rabies has a positive message of hope; that we can be the Final Rabies Generation and supports the World Health Organisation (WHO) target of no human deaths from rabies by 2030.

The idea of the campaign is to raise enough money for the vaccinations and to send over 300 trained volunteers, including skilled vets, to rabies hot spots every year – implementing rabies vaccinations programmes in places where they are most needed.

Mission Rabies’ CEO, Luke Gamble said:

Every year, millions of people receive rabies vaccinations to enable them to travel to rabies endemic countries. No-one thinks twice about the people living in these countries, who can’t afford those vaccinations themselves. In many countries, they can’t even access them. Rabies has a devastating impact on children and their families in many parts of the world – and we need to change that. With The Final Rabies Generation campaign, we’re putting rabies on the agenda, both so that children living in fear of this deadly disease can have hope for the future, and so that everyone realises this is a shared mission we can achieve together.

Mission Rabies works in India, Malawi, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Cambodia, where the projects have already vaccinated over 1.3 million dogs since they began in 2013.

Photo: Patrick Hendry