Role of dog sterilisation and vaccination in rabies control programmes

THE recent article by Cleaveland and others (2014) presents a case for an integrated One Health strategy to control and eliminate rabies in low-income countries. We agree with most of the authors' arguments but felt a comment was warranted on the statement that concurrent dog sterilisation programmes would not be helpful in reducing rabies incidence solely because ‘rabies transmission does not depend on dog population density’. First, the way in which dog density is calculated raises serious issues about the validity of the parameter. Does one calculate …