Rabies deaths are rising. What is going wrong?

“In a lot of these countries, the average life expectancy of dogs is very low, and so the turnover of the dog population is quick,” Prof Lankester explained.

“So, if you vaccinate in year one and you hit your targets, but then you don’t vaccinate so much in year two and year three, very quickly you’ll lose herd immunity because unvaccinated puppies will be born and vaccinated dogs will die,” he said.

“You can go from 70 per cent coverage to below 40 per cent coverage within a year and a half, and once it’s below 40 per cent then rabies transmission can be sustained, and it will come back.”

As a case in point, rabies has re-emerged as a serious public health concern in Ukraine in recent years as a result of disruption to vaccination programmes and a surge in displaced and abandoned pets.

The number of people bitten by rabid animals with rabies increased from 780 in 2021 to 2,507 in 2024, according to data from the Ukrainian Ministry of Health.

What about culling? Are we neglecting an important tool that has helped bring rabies under control out of concern for animal rights?

It’s now quite hard to imagine the hero of a book written today coldly putting down a rabid dog, and you do not need to look far for evidence of how unpopular the idea of culling dogs, or even taking steps to remove them from cities, is.

Mass protests erupted in India last year after the country’s top court, acting on its own authority against what it called the public health “menace” of rabies, ordered the authorities to begin rounding up the city’s population of stray dogs and putting them into shelters.

Yet the order was welcomed by the family of Chhavi Sharma, a six-year-old girl who died from a rabies infection after being bitten by a stray dog in the Indian capital.

“I hope there are no more Chhavis, who are hurt elsewhere. Nobody should go through the cruel fate we underwent,” her aunt told local television.