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

Chapter 5: Rabid Dogs and Frenzied Jackals: The Return of Canine Rabies

Chapter 5 Rabid Dogs and Frenzied Jackals The Return of Canine Rabies In a little less than three decades the situation in southern Africa had altered from what seemed a simple restricted enzootic focus to a complex, overlapping structure involving at least two separate host systems, and entangling the Republic and its neighbours in a major public health problem. We are fortunate that control measures in urban areas are effective and relativelyeasytoapply.However,inareaswhereasubstantialwildlifereservoir has developed or where large populations of stray dogs remain uncontrolled and uninoculated control measures are very much less effective. Courtney Meredith, 19771 In 1950 the rabies situation in South Africa changed forever. In June 1950 came the confirmation that canine rabies had returned to South Africa for the first time in more than fifty years. The owner of the dog was a nurse from Messina (now Musina) who seemed well aware of the symptoms of rabies. Her dog had been bitten on the leg by another canid. As the disease progressed, the dog began to howl in a strange manner . It wandered long distances and fought with other animals. It also had a depraved appetite, and its personality appeared remarkably odd. On that basis she had her pet put down and sent the brain to the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute to endorse her diagnosis. The laboratory tests confirmed rabies.2 Geographically, Messina was near the border with Southern Rhodesia, which had its first certified case in September 1950.3 Subsequent investigations in Southern Rhodesia revealed that Africans had observed rabid dogs traversing the Limpopo River Basin for some time, and their response was to cull stray and sick animals, without informing the authorities .4 Distrust of the colonial state or just indifference toward its functions meant that the veterinary department was slow to learn of the arrival of The Return of Canine Rabies |  rabies, emphasizing how the collation of epidemiological data was so dependent on the willing collaboration of rural communities. Rabies then dispersed throughout the Limpopo border region, and by 1952 the disease had reached the gates of the Kruger National Park. Veterinarians were terrified that roaming canids would bring rabies into the game reserve, where the virus could emerge like a cancer that was hard to locate but could spread unabated.5 Writing in 1977, Courtney Meredith, then based at the National Institute of Virology (Johannesburg), gave a succinct overview of what had altered in South Africa over the past three decades. Before 1950 the only scientifically established reservoir of the rabies virus was the yellow mongoose , although virologists had also ascribed some human deaths from hydrophobia to bites dispensed by other small animals such as genets. At that time scientists believed that dogs contracted rabies from meerkats, rather than disseminating it among themselves. The mongoose variant of Southern and Central Africa, ca. 1950  | Rabid Dogs and Frenzied Jackals the classical rabies virus is genetically slightly different from the type that circulates in canids, and dogs are not sufficiently susceptible to mongoose rabies to become its permanent hosts.6 Unlike the 1893–94 canine epizootic in Port Elizabeth, which was stamped out because it remained confined to the city, this new outbreak covered vast areas of countryside. Domestic dogs, along with wild species of canids, namely jackals and bat-eared foxes, all succumbed to the disease. Whereas it was possible to contain it to some extent among domestic animals, especially with the introduction of canine vaccinations in the 1950s, it soon became evident that managing rabies in the wild would prove an immense challenge. And this challenge continues to this day. The arrival of canine rabies in South Africa followed a decade or so in which the virus had gradually migrated southward from central Africa. Historically, there had been recorded epizootics of canine rabies north of the Zambezi River, in present-day Zambia. During the 1940s the virus spread through the Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana) and eventually reached South Africa and Southern Rhodesia in 1950. In the following decade rabies moved eastward into Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) and then traveled southward along the coast until it reached Natal in 1961. From the 1940s there was also a parallel southward march, as rabid canines strayed from the Angolan–South West African (Namibia) border, where the disease had been endemic for a long time, into the pastoral heartland of South West Africa, which at that time was governed by South Africa. Rabid dogs, both wild...