Mad Dogs and Meerkats: A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa

Chapter 6: Terror Hits the Streets: The Urbanization of Rabies in KwaZulu-Natal

Chapter 6 Terror Hits the Streets The Urbanization of Rabies in KwaZulu-Natal Even after many years of experience of rabies, I am still revolted by it . . . the gasping and panting, the fear of water, the foaming at the mouth. It is one hell of a way to die.1 Derek Lawson, 1980 In his interview for the Sunday Times of 14 September 1980, Dr. Derek Lawson, deputy superintendent of King Edward VIII Hospital in Durban, reminded his readers of the horrors of hydrophobia.At the time of writing, Lawson had been caring for five black children who had been brought to the hospital by their parents when they began to behave“abnormally.”They had not received any antirabic vaccines after being bitten by rabid dogs, so death was inevitable. Lawson explained that despite years of experience with rabies, treating people on the Zambian Copperbelt, as well as in Natal, he remained traumatized by the experience, especially when the victims were children. Children, he argued, were particularly vulnerable because of their short stature and their greater curiosity toward animals that would normally be regarded as pets.2 Lawson was facing a major epidemic that had broken out in Durban and Natal in 1979–80 and was symptomatic of the disease’s growing endemicity in the region. Seven years after Lawson’s interview, the veterinarian Gareth Bath stated: “Rabies is now officially regarded as the province’s major animal disease problem, and strays, many from KwaZulu, are a major cause of the spread.  | Terror Hits the Streets Natal has 90 percent of the country’s rabies cases, and 90 percent of them are concentrated in the coastal region from the Transkei border to Eshowe and including Durban.”3 Bath was head of theAllerton Rabies Laboratory,a newly established diagnostic unit set up outside Pietermaritzburg to deal with this disease. The Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute could no longer cope with the large number of samples sent to them for testing. The founding of Allerton in 1987, to deal specifically with cases from Natal and the KwaZulu homeland , was symptomatic of the growing problem rabies posed; it represented a dramatic shift in the epidemiology of the disease in South Africa. Rabies was first identified in Natal in July 1961. South African scientists assumed that the virus had crossed the border from Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) into Zululand, from where it rapidly moved southward, reaching the cities of Durban and Pietermaritzburg by the end of that year. Veterinary regulations together with canine vaccination did not result in the eradication of rabies from Natal, but the authorities were able to control the disease to some degree, and human and animal cases had declined by the end of the 1960s. Ten years later rabies was on the rise again, and mortality rates continued to increase throughout the 1980s and 1990s. KwaZulu and Natal. The shaded area represents the KwaZulu homeland. The Urbanization of Rabies in KwaZulu-Natal |  In 1986 the rabies virus crossed the Umtamvuma River into the Transkei and had dispersed throughout that homeland, reaching the current limits of its spread in southeastern South Africa by the early 1990s.4 The resurgence of rabies in KwaZulu-Natal was due to a number of environmental,political,and socioeconomic factors. Unlike in the Transvaal, where canine rabies infected jackals and became endemic among these wild canids,there were too few jackals in Natal for them to act as the local reservoir for the rabies virus. In Natal rabies was always a disease of domestic dogs. People contracted hydrophobia from them because they lived in such close proximity to human habitation. In the rural areas there were also some cases in cattle, but the economic losses were not as high as in the Transvaal or in Namibia. In Natal, unlike in other parts of South Africa, rabies emerged as an urban as well as a rural disease, with many human fatalities occurring in the cities, especially the impoverished townships and informal settlements that were home to many African people.This reflected a change in the environmental conditions that sustained the virus and enabled it to spread from rural to urban ecologies. But human agency was also important, and the history of rabies in Natal needs to be situated within the wider political history of late apartheid South Africa. From the 1970s, the political history of South Africa and Mozambique became increasingly turbulent and remained so until the...