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The impact of poverty on dog ownership and access to canine rabies vaccination: results from a knowledge, attitudes and practices survey, Uganda 2013
- Source :
- Infectious Diseases of Poverty, Infectious Diseases of Poverty, Vol 6, Iss 1, Pp 1-22 (2017)
- Publication Year :
- 2017
- Publisher :
- Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2017.
-
Abstract
- Background Rabies is a neglected disease despite being responsible for more human deaths than any other zoonosis. A lack of adequate human and dog surveillance, resulting in low prioritization, is often blamed for this paradox. Estimation methods are often employed to describe the rabies burden when surveillance data are not available, however these figures are rarely based on country-specific data. Methods In 2013 a knowledge, attitudes, and practices survey was conducted in Uganda to understand dog population, rabies vaccination, and human rabies risk factors and improve in-country and regional rabies burden estimates. Poisson and multi-level logistic regression techniques were conducted to estimate the total dog population and vaccination coverage. Results Twenty-four villages were selected, of which 798 households completed the survey, representing 4 375 people. Dog owning households represented 12.9% of the population, for which 175 dogs were owned (25 people per dog). A history of vaccination was reported in 55.6% of owned dogs. Poverty and human population density highly correlated with dog ownership, and when accounted for in multi-level regression models, the human to dog ratio fell to 47:1 and the estimated national canine-rabies vaccination coverage fell to 36.1%. This study estimates there are 729 486 owned dogs in Uganda (95% CI: 719 919 – 739 053). Ten percent of survey respondents provided care to dogs they did not own, however unowned dog populations were not enumerated in this estimate. 89.8% of Uganda’s human population was estimated to reside in a community that can support enzootic canine rabies transmission. Conclusions This study is the first to comprehensively evaluate the effect of poverty on dog ownership in Africa. These results indicate that describing a dog population may not be as simple as applying a human: dog ratio, and factors such as poverty are likely to heavily influence dog ownership and vaccination coverage. These modelled estimates should be confirmed through further field studies, however, if validated, canine rabies elimination through mass vaccination may not be as difficult as previously considered in Uganda. Data derived from this study should be considered to improve models for estimating the in-country and regional rabies burden. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s40249-017-0306-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
- Subjects :
- Adult
0301 basic medicine
Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice
medicine.medical_specialty
Veterinary medicine
Rabies
030231 tropical medicine
Population
Logistic regression
Health Services Accessibility
lcsh:Infectious and parasitic diseases
Young Adult
03 medical and health sciences
Dogs
0302 clinical medicine
Environmental health
Animals
Humans
Medicine
lcsh:RC109-216
Uganda
education
Poverty
Neglected
education.field_of_study
business.industry
lcsh:Public aspects of medicine
Public health
Vaccination
Ownership
Zoonosis
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
Low-income
lcsh:RA1-1270
General Medicine
Middle Aged
medicine.disease
030104 developmental biology
Infectious Diseases
Africa
Enzootic
business
Research Article
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 20499957
- Volume :
- 6
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Infectious Diseases of Poverty
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....a1ca25d657ef38a8653ecde67fb5ffb9