Indian as Rabies Capital

India sees more Deaths from rabies than any other country and nearly Three-Quarters of them occur in just seven central and south-eastern States, according to a research that will be published shortly in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

The research is part of the ongoing ‘Million Death Study’ that uses ‘Verbal Autopsies’ to identify causes of death that take place in a nationally representative sample of over two million Indian households.

Using this methodology, researchers estimated that there were 12,700 deaths in the country in 2005 from ‘Furious Rabies,  whose victims display the Classic Symptoms associated with the disease, such as Fear of Water (Hydrophobia). Almost Three-Quarters of those deaths were in Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Assam and Madhya Pradesh. In which Uttar Pradesh alone accounted for about One-Third of the Deaths .

A 2003 assessment carried out by the Association for Prevention and Control of Rabies in India, with the support of the World Health Organisation, had estimated the number of ‘Furious Rabies’ deaths at about 17,000.  A factor of 20 per cent was added to take into Account Paralytic or Atypical Rabies, taking the total number of deaths to around 20,000.

Local factors heavily influenced how such clusters of cases formed in different parts of the country. Those factors needed to be understood and taken into account when identifying high-prevalence areas .