Drastic actions urgently required

MM Online - Rabies claims sixth victim in Sarawak (extracts):

KUCHING, Feb 5 — A 59-year-old man from Batu Kawah died of rabies encephalitis yesterday, Local Government and Housing Minister Datuk Dr Sim Kui Hian said today.

This brings the death toll to six since the rabies outbreak was first reported in July last year. [...]

The other victims who succumbed to rabies encephalitis last year were all from the Serian Division. They included four children and an adult.

Sarawak is not controlling the rabies outbreak safely enough. Action must be taken to arrest the rabies spread which punishes the victims with very painful death.

Unless the individual dogs have been identified as belonging to a owner who can show proof of the animal having receiving anti-rabies vaccination, all dogs must be culled immediately.

Let me say this before dog lovers scream at me with vile abuses. I am a dog lover myself and have only call for such drastic action because the outbreak last year obviously has not been dealt with successfully/effectively.

While dogs have earned the notoriety of being the main source of human rabies deaths, other animals that can carry the rabies virus are cats, monkeys, musangs (civet cats), bats, wild pigs, bears, and many other mammals, and they pass the virus from one to any other, eg. like an infected musang biting a cat or an infected bat biting a dog.

We all have to draw a public health line in the sand. The current situation in Sarawak calls for drastic swift actions that seem callous, brutal and non-compassionate to animal lovers, but human lives are far more important than creatures, and if need be, and that need is now, the culling of canines, felines and similar creature like bats and musangs, etc must be conducted A.S.A.P.

The health authorities won't have the time nor the resources to catch strays, examine each of them and vaccinate the infected ones. Any dog and cat that has not been identified as having been vaccinated must be culled straightaway.