What is your background?
I am a veterinarian specializing in infectious disease surveillance, epidemiology, and wild animal health. My first exposure to the world of rabies came when I won a scholarship as an 18-year-old who paid for a 9-month trip to Zimbabwe to volunteer with a veterinary team that was doing research on rabies in jackals and domestic dogs. That experience opened my eyes to the issue of human rabies and the link with domestic dogs. It is remarkable that after many years working on other diseases and issues, the circle has been completed and my career has brought me back to where I started, working with rabies again.
Why do you focus on rabies?
Rabies impacts so many communities and lives and is really the one major public health disease that veterinarians are responsible for and can make a big difference on. For this reason, as a veterinarian, I became involved in the Rabies Free Africa program as I felt it was an area where my expertise in infectious diseases of animals and humans and my knowledge of the role that wildlife play can be used most effectively.
How important is donor support?
Human rabies is a disease affecting relatively poor countries and, if the past is anything to go by, it is not going to be controlled or eliminated through funding coming only from national governments. There are too many competing problems! Rather, for rabies to be controlled, funding often needs to first come from philanthropy and donor-funded initiatives to kick start rabies control programs, which, if implemented well and across a sufficiently broad geographic range, can achieve benefits pretty rapidly, reducing the incidence of human rabies to close to zero within a number of months. These outcomes demonstrate to communities that they don’t have to live with the threat of rabies — and this can have a knock-on effect, energizing the community and the local governments to demand rabies control activities are continued.