Bill Gates throws £6m lifeline to Scots team fighting rabies killer

Published on Sunday 20 September 2009 22:15

PIONEERING Scots researchers have secured a £6 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help save the lives of more than 100 children a day from rabies.

Scientists from the University of Glasgow will help the World Health Organisation tackle the disease in Africa and south-east Asia by targeting an estimated 1.5 million domestic dogs with vaccines.

It is the first time the prestigious charitable organisation, founded by the Windows mogul, has given money to protect human health through treating animals.

Dr Sarah Cleaveland, of the university's Vet School and Life Sciences Faculty, will act as a key member of the scientific advisory team to the WHO's department of Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD) which received the grant.

She said: "This is an ideal time to tackle rabies. And if we don't tackle it now, it may be much more difficult in 20 years.

"The time is right, now, to eliminate it at source. If you get rid of rabies in domestic dogs, we think we should be able to get rid of it everywhere else."

The researcher and university colleagues Dan Haydon, Katie Hampson and Tiziana Lembo, worked in the Serengeti to analyse the genetic sequence of the rabies virus, first brought to Africa by settlers in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Domestic dogs were shown to be driving the virus strain and to eradicate the disease, the researchers said 70 per cent of dogs needed to be vaccinated. The approach, based on work by Dr Cleaveland in the 1990s around Serengeti National Park, was hugely successful and rabies is virtually gone from the area.

An estimated 55,000 people die from the disease each year worldwide, or about 150 a day. Most of them are children under the age of 15.

Rabies is usually transmitted by a bite from a rabid dog. Once symptoms develop it is fatal to both animals and humans. Dr Cleaveland said this was not a case of a neglected disease, but simply neglected communities.

She said: "There's no reason we should not eliminate this disease. It doesn't kill as many people as HIV, malaria or TB, but it is such a horrific way to die and such an easy disease to prevent.

"I do get quite impassioned about this. I have been working on this for most of my adult career and we really have a chance now to do something about the disease."

The grant of $9,996,674 (about 6,141,000), will be spent rolling out a canine vaccination programme targeting domestic dogs in three areas: Tanzania, Kwa Zulu Natal in South Africa and the Visayas archipelago of the Philippines. Work on the first full-scale canine vaccination programme has just got under way in Tanzania, the main site of the five-year project.

Dr Cleaveland will oversee the programme between Glasgow and the eastern African country where 24 districts will participate.

Dr Cleaveland said she and the WHO team hoped the project will provide the basis of a wider strategy for the prevention and elimination of human rabies in other low income countries.

The WHO project is expected to increase rabies awareness in the three target countries and demonstrate that a strategy based on dog rabies control is sustainable, cost-effective and can lead to the elimination of the disease in humans.

The project will also give a boost to similar initiatives for the control and elimination of rabies in Africa and Asia within the next decade.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was founded in 1994 and paid out a total of 1.7 billion in grants in 2008.