Optimizing rabies vaccination of dogs in India

Note: Below is the abstract of a manuscript that we have submitted to peer review (see the pre-print here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.10.23288318v1). The final version may differ and should be cited instead when it becomes available.

Abstract

Dog vaccination is the key to controlling rabies in human populations. However, in countries like India, with large free-roaming dog populations, vaccination strategies that rely only on parenteral vaccines are unlikely to be either feasible or successful. Oral rabies vaccines could be used to reach dogs which are either not owned or have small probability of being brought to vaccination centers. We show that an oral bait handout method for free-roaming dogs can reduce costs of vaccination campaigns, and increase vaccine coverage, using linear optimization. This finding holds even when baits cost up to 10x the price of parenteral vaccines, if there is a large dog population or proportion of dogs that are never confined. We suggest that the use of oral rabies vaccine baits will be required to meet the initiative to eradicate human deaths from dog-mediated rabies by 2030.

Acknowledgments

This research is a project of Rethink Priorities. It was written by Kim Cuddington and William McAuliffe. Thanks to reviewers Greer Gosnell and Willem Sleegers. If you are interested in Rethink Priorities' work, please consider subscribing to our newsletter . You can explore our completed public work here .