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Administration pushes back rabies-free deadline to 2015
The Bali administration officially admitted for the first time on Wednesday that its fight against rabies is not proceeding exactly as it had foreseen, and disclosed that it would consider pushing back its deadline for eradicating rabies on the island by three years to 2015
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he Bali administration officially admitted for the first time on Wednesday that its fight against rabies is not proceeding exactly as it had foreseen, and disclosed that it would consider pushing back its deadline for eradicating rabies on the island by three years to 2015.
“There is a possibility that the target will be altered from achieving the rabies-free status in 2012, to 2015,” administration spokesman I Ketut Teneng said.
The change underlines the difficulty the administration is currently facing in fighting a deadly rabies epidemic that has claimed 148 lives and spread to all regencies on the island since it broke out in late 2008. The first outbreak hit two villages in the southern regency of Badung, spreading to 269 villages at its peak.
The administration said it would eradicate rabies on the island by 2012 in a public campaign in late 2010 in Ungasan, which was where the first rabies case had been reported two years earlier.
After the announcement, senior administration officials repeatedly expressed their optimism that the target would be met. But experts doubted the administration had sufficient resources and methods to fulfill their promise.
However, the administration had not officially stated that it would alter its 2012 target.
“We are still working very hard to ensure that there will be no new infections or new rabies cases in animals in 2012,” Teneng said.
The idea of pushing back the deadline was based on a realistic assessment of the epidemic, he said.
“We are still finding new rabies cases in humans and animals. Based on this fact it would be very difficult to achieve the rabies-free status in 2012,” he added.
Teneng said the administration had the resources to extend its fight against the disease beyond 2012.
“We have drafted the rabies budget up until 2015. We estimated that for dogs and pets vaccinations alone in the province would cost Rp 3 billion [US$348,000] per year,” he added.
The provincial animal husbandry agency head Putu Sumantra said he believed the island would achieve the 2012 deadline.
“We have achieved significant improvements in our fight against the disease. The declining number of new rabies cases in dogs and the increasing number of infected villages reporting no new cases are among those improvements.
In 2010, around 500 dogs were tested positive for rabies. As of the first five months of 2011 that number was below 100. Of the 269 villages that originally reported rabies cases, 70 have have had no cases in the last 12 months.
“These are good signs and hopefully the situation will keep getting better,” he said.
On Wednesday, the administration launched the second phase of a three-month mass vaccination drive targeting stray dogs and pets across the island.
In the first month the drive will focus on Bangli, Karangasem and Klungkung regencies, before shifting to the island’s other regencies in the second and third months.
“The target of the drive is to inoculate 70 percent of the total population of dogs and pets on the island,” Teneng said.
The drive is co-financed by the government and the provincial administration.
