GARC’s first effort to bring the rabies community together to discuss and raise awareness of the problem was World Rabies Day. World Rabies Day was established in 2007 to support advocacy for increased rabies control efforts, provide information on how to prevent the disease in communities at risk, and raise global awareness of rabies. It is held annually on September 28 and features events, media outreach, and other initiatives from local to international governments, professionals, and individuals.
During an analysis of barriers to more successful rabies control efforts and potential solutions, GARC’s Partners for Rabies Prevention recognized its potential to have an impact, supporting its development. One of the main issues with basic rabies prevention is a lack of awareness among people living in rabies-endemic areas—that they need to vaccinate their dogs to prevent the disease at its source, that they should wash any wound, seek medical attention after being bitten by an animal, and that acting on this knowledge can save lives an inclusive platform can assist stakeholders in rabies control and prevention efforts in sharing resources, successes, and gaining recognition and support. Individuals and organizations working on this issue worldwide are frequently isolated. Rabies lacks the support and resources necessary to eradicate it because it is a neglected disease. Health awareness days have the power to inspire social and political support for policy shifts, thereby elevating the issue of rabies to the forefront and attracting resources for programs to control it. As a result, World Rabies Day was intended as a day of education and action to connect disparate groups working toward the same objective and allow rabies prevention messages to be tailored and delivered to a variety of distinct audiences. World Rabies Day was established in 2007 by GARC and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with support from the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) as co-sponsors. It has been observed annually on September 28th, the anniversary of Louis Pasteur’s death, the first successful rabies vaccine’s development, with the exception of the first year. To encourage stakeholders at all levels to participate in a unified day of action against rabies, World Rabies Day was designed to be an open, global, and inclusive platform. The first World Rabies Day campaign had the following goals:
GARC serves as a facilitator, supporter, promoter, and aggregator of activities (referred to as “World Rabies Day” “events”) to amplify the commitment of the global rabies community and to increase attention from the media and policymakers. It also educates people in countries where rabies is endemic, particularly children and health professionals.
The campaign was developed using a three-pronged strategy because of GARC’s limited personnel and financial resources:
- Development of the World Rabies Day event platform and global toolkits to offer individual community members resources and materials for action.
- GARC and key rabies stakeholders promote and distribute World Rabies Day messages.
- GARC actively manages year-specific activities to bring attention to particular issues.
World Rabies Day has always emphasized the One Health strategy and actively encouraged sector-to-sector collaboration. For instance, in 2014, GARC organized a competition for veterinary and medical students working together called the Global One Health Challenge. The winning team went to a conference hosted by the World Medical Association and the WVA. There were 29 entries that spread rabies prevention messages to more than 1,600,000 people and resulted in the vaccination of more than 12,000 animals. GARC’s 2014 Me and My Dog campaign to encourage people to keep their dogs vaccinated by sharing photos of themselves and their dogs on our platforms is one recent World Rabies Day initiative built around social media. This initiative had 123,500 active participants, was shared on the timelines of more than 6 million people, and it became a national trend in India (where the campaign was centred). In addition, the GARC account gained 700 new Facebook followers and the ability to continue communicating with these individuals in the future. In 2015, World Rabies Day asked its followers on social media to sign up for a “Thunderclap.” This gave them the right to post a World Rabies Day message on their timeline at the same time as all the other participants, increasing the impact of the message, which reached 246,086 social media accounts.
World Rabies Day has recently received the support of governments from all over the world and is now an essential component of the plan to eradicate rabies worldwide. It organizes a single day of action, mostly in countries where rabies is common, to educate people, remind people to vaccinate (and re-vaccinate) their animals, highlight local rabies prevention efforts, and call for more aggressive control measures.
Kerala Academy of Pharmacy supports and spread awareness about the End Rabies Now, a new GARC-coordinated multi-partner year-round campaign that builds political pressure to work toward zero human deaths from canine-mediated rabies by 2030, and the recent rollout of the global framework are both influenced by World Rabies Day’s media coverage.
