School children participated in virtual seminar on “Rabies Education”

In observation of World Rabies Day, Humane Society International/India, an animal welfare organisation, with Global Alliance for Rabies Control (GARC) organised 9 free online webinars, entitled “Awareness about Rabies Prevention”.

A total of 263 students and teachers from various schools across Vadodara, Dehradun and Lucknow participated in the online session.

The presenters were Dr. Amit Chaudhari, HSI/India’s senior program manager for monitoring and evaluation, Dr. Piyush Patel, Senior Manager and Dr Shrikant Verma, Deputy Manager, Dog Population Management Program, Faizan Jalil, Senior Manager, Community Engagement.

The one week seminar was successfully held via video conferencing, lasted till 28th September and covered topics such as, history of rabies, becoming aware of the disease, how it spreads, and understand what we can do to prevent it. The students were told about vaccinating animals to prevent the disease and encouraging post-exposure vaccination to save people exposed to potentially rabid animals. The children were given a chance to ask the presenters questions to clarify on the subject.

Neelkanth Verma, of Trustee Triveni Sangam School, say, “Students were not aware about rabies earlier and now they have become aware about rabies as well what they can do after a dog bite and where they can get Anti Rabies Vaccine”.

Currently, HSI/India has its presence in Dehradun and Nainital (Uttarakhand), Vadodara (Gujarat) and Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh) and runs a holistic dog management program, working on the population management of street dogs and brings in the communities to participate in issues related to their street dogs.

Since 2013, it has sterilized over 138,064 and vaccinated over 1, 81,558 dogs across many cities of India.