Crypto News: Who's a good boy then?

Hi, it's Janice in Johannesburg, where summer has fully arrived and people are getting outdoors. This means more dogs are being taken for walks or to the local park to play, which has vast benefits, but also some risks. But before we get to that...

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When I was a kid we had cats, bunnies, guinea pigs, hamsters, fish, a tortoise, and for a short time snakes, at home. That made us about the only family on the block than didn't own a dog.

My mom, a registered nurse, ensured all four of us siblings got all the recommended childhood vaccines. But she still regularly reminded us to watch out for rusty nails and any dog that was acting strangely, especially if it was frothing at the mouth.

That's because dogs are responsible for 99% of rabies cases globally. Rabies, which is is often transmitted via a bite, is a particularly feared and fabled disease (I mean who can forget Cujo?) and is almost always fatal for animals and people once clinical signs appear.

Most people, it seems, know this. Many are also aware that rabies is entirely preventable by vaccinating their canine companions. And yet a few recent studies show that only about half of owners get the needed shot for their pet.

One way to counter this is to send animal health teams door-to-door. In my home town of Gqeberha in South Africa, which is in a region with the highest incidence of both animal and human rabies cases in the country, this method has been a great success — earlier this year almost 20,000 dogs got their rabies shot in just four months.

Still, some people simply won't consent to their furry family being inoculated. My colleague in August wrote about how vaccine skepticism had spread among US dog owners, where more than half said they were concerned about vaccinating their dogs, including against rabies.

This comes with a big public health cost. There is a human rabies vaccine, but it's very expensive — prohibitively so for swathes of people. One study showed that coordinated mass dog vaccination between African countries that led to the elimination of dog rabies on the continent would result in total welfare gains of $9.5 billion between 2024 and 2054.

So this new initiative that targets specific neighborhoods, and is being rolled out in South Africa, Sri Lanka and Nepal, is a super helpful step in achieving the goal of eradicating rabies deaths.

Because when a trained professional comes to your district ready to offer the shot and convincingly answer any questions you have, it's harder to ignore the benefits that getting it done would bring.

Until then, like my mom, I will also be telling my children to watch out for dogs frothing at the mouth, or any other animal behaving strangely for that matter. — Janice Kew

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