Corpn to start rabies drive in July

For the first time in several years, the Greater Chennai Corporation has planned to conduct mass immunisation drive for stray dogs to prevent spreading of rabies. The drive is followed by an enumeration of dogs nearly six months ago.

According to a Chennai Corporation official, the drive would be conducted from July and is planned to be complete in 45 to 50 days. “As per the dog census, there are more than 57,000 stray dogs in the city. All the dogs would be covered during the drive,” the official said.

Seven teams have been formed to carry out the drive and each team would cover a specific area and a particular number of dogs.

“Even though only a few rabies cases were reported in the city, we should vaccinate the stray dogs once in a year.

However, due to several reasons, we could not conduct mass immunisation drive in the past. We will try to conduct immunisation drives at least once in two years if we could not do it every year,” he added.

Earlier the civic body would vaccinate the dogs against rabies when they were caught for sterilisation and so, non-sterilised dogs are mostly prone to the disease and would spread it to humans.

To keep track of the immunised dogs, higher officials had directed the teams to colour spray the dogs and take photographs of every dog for documentation.

As per the dog census report prepared by the Chennai Corporation, there are 57,366 stray dogs in the city. During the census conducted in 2014, there were 82,458 stray dogs.

Among the 15 zones in Chennai Corporation, Ambattur has the highest number of dogs with more than 7,300 strays.

Of the total stray dogs, 13,837 dogs are sterilised female dogs, 19,861 are sterilised males. There were 5,665 puppies in the city when the census was completed.