Lethal bite: Govt hospitals in Peshawar out of rabies vaccine

District health authorities have been told to wait for fresh supplies till July

PESHAWAR: People have been facing immense problems with many lives endangered as not a single government hospital offers anti-rabies injections for dog bites claiming they were out of stock. Private facilities have been charging Rs750 to Rs900 for vaccination against dog bites.

For Peshawar alone, shots of Rs1.3 million were provided to the district health office which had been distributed among the health facilities across the district however the office, now, does not have even a single dose available.

“We utilised all the shots we purchased for Rs1.3million and have now asked the National Institute of Health to provide us vaccines against Rs1.5 million but we are told to wait until July,” DHO Peshawar Dr Gull Muhammad told The Express Tribune.

There have been cases reported in the recent past where peoples were advised by the health department employees to vaccinate against rabies in private health facilities, a medical officer at a health facility informed.



“If we don’t have any facility and that too in rabies like sensitive case, we tell people to go to private facilities,” the medical officer informed however requested anonymity since he was not entitled to speak to media.

According to Dr Dost Muhammad, rabies infected central nervous system and tries to reach the brain while going through the peripheral nervous system adding most of the times, it depends upon the bite site since disease’s occurrence was variable as the more the bite site was closer to brain, the more speedily it reached the brain.

“We have reported cases of rabies reaching the brain in 10 years also and let me clear not only dogs, but cow and goat also carry rabies but since their bites does not puncher the skin to get into blood stream, it does not infects the bitten,” Dr Dost Muhammad told The Express Tribune.



He also stated that such infections could be cured before the clinical signs appeared otherwise once appeared, it always ended up in death whether humans of animals adding normally five shots cured the infection but in some areas, one shot was also enough.

According to Dr Dost Muhammad, most of the times humans suffer from Hydrophobia and has an effect swallowing reflexes terming it the reason why humans fear swimming after being infected where at the same time added once animals were infected, they [animals] lost natural fear from human beings.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 28^th, 2018.