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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: July-August 2007

Bogus vaccines contribute to human rabies death toll in China

 

BEIJING--Counterfeit human post-exposure rabies vaccine has resurfaced as a factor in the fast-rising human rabies death toll in China, Chinese media reported in late July 2007. The fake vaccine reappeared two years after officials believed it had all been destroyed, following the deaths of two boys who received worthless "post-exposure" treatment.

Human rabies deaths in China have increased from 163 in 1996 to 3,215 in 2006, with 1,043 in the first five months of 2007. The rise is roughly parallel to the increasing popularity of dogs as pets--but the rabies cases are overwhelmingly concentrated in the southern and coastal areas where dogs are raised for meat. So-called "meat dogs" are not required to be vaccinated, unlike pet dogs.

For the second consecutive year dogs were massacred amid spring rabies panics in Qhongqing province. News coverage of the killing was suppressed, unlike in 2006, when the officially directed dog purges were much criticized by both official news media and on public Internet forums.

Also suppressed--but not entirely--was coverage of an April 24, 2007 incident in Huoyanyuan, Nanjing, in which, according to Wang Feng of the Southern Metropolis Daily, a small mob of both men and women whose sleep had been disturbed by barking burned a mother dog and her litter of two.

"After the news story broke in the Modern Express Daily on April 26," Wang Feng wrote, "netizens by the hundreds showed up at the forums to call for respect for life, to establish laws to protect animals, and to condemn" the offenders. The burned dog and her surviving puppy were taken for medical care. Many established an open-air altar to commemorate the dead puppy, with wreaths of fresh flowers. Someone published the identity, work address, home address, office number and personal mobile telephone number of the person who set the dogs on fire. Many people waited outside her office and harassed her when she came out. They published photographs and videos of her on the Internet," and petitioned her employer and the city of Nanjing to take action against her.

The city responded by proposing an animal control ordinance. Like others in China, it would restrict dog-keeping to approved breeds, of less than 35 centimeters in height. Dogs would be barred from hospitals, schools, museums, theaters, restaurants, shopping malls, hotels, kindergartens, playgrounds, scenic spots, banks, and other financial institutions.

Nanjing officials told China Daily that the estimated 93,000 dogs in the city were responsible for 30,000 reported bites in 2006.

A similar ordinance was introduced almost simultaneously in Hangzhou Estimating that fewer than half of the dogs in Hangzhou are licensed, city spokespersons said that complaints about dogs made up 43% of the total volume of public complaints that the city received.

Beijing had 703,879 licensed dogs as of August 2007, up 100,000 in the first half of the year. Bites were up 34%, to 83,000.