Congratulations! Rabies is such a scary disease but these vaccination campaigns do work. Germany, Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria and the Czech Republic became officially rabies free in 2003 after many years of vaccinating wild foxes and all the red rabies warning signs of my childhood are finally gone.
The history of rabies in Europe is particularly interesting. Rabies has been eradicated between 80's and 90's from France, Finland, Belgium, Switzerland, etc when the countries started to develop programs to vaccinate the main wild reservoir (and is not a bat, it was the red fox). The problem was reduced by an 80% or eradicated in many countries.
Currently things are starting to became more complex because we have a new actor coming from the east that is basically an European coyote, the golden jackal and because the 2008 crisis hit hard reintroducing the problem in Greece. Poland had problems with rabies also but vaccination of wild carnivores worked really well when culling failed loudly. Is the way to do it.
As far as zoonosis (animal-transmitted human diseases) go...
Rabies infects a lot of animals, but many places of the world are now effectively rabies-free thanks to smart inoculation of foxes etc. with baits.
We had last proven rabies case in the wild in 2002. (The Czech Republic, a landlocked continental country, not an isolated island.)
You can still fall to rabies contracted from bats if extremely unlucky, but compared to countries like India where the disease still runs rampant, rabies is a solved problem in most of Europe.
Maybe there will be a similar way to inoculate the wild mustelids against Covid one day. To be honest, human antivaxxers strike me as a bigger problem than random mink. I don't meet many mink on a regular day, but people with their masks halfway down are all too common.
Rabies only has animal reservoirs, it isn't spread person-to-person. And it appears that the localities that have eradicated rabies have done so by dropping animal baits with oral vaccines.
So... small, mostly deforested island countries may have a good chance against animal-borne viruses that have inexpensive edible vaccines.
The wealthiest country in the world hasn't managed to eradicate rabies. Covid isn't going to end this way.
In America [and most other countries that have done a similarly good or better job of suppressing rabies] the wildlife are the ones getting vaccinated against it. Vaccinating the wildlife by baiting them with an oral vaccine is very effective and can eradicate rabies from a region (vaccinating the general public cannot do that, since person-to-person transmission is not really the concern.)
Hum, not. Is obligatory for dogs (it was like 50€ or so), but children aren't vaccinated from rabies normally in Spain at the school.
Rabies is endemic in Ceuta and Melilla in any case. I don't know if people in those places are systematically vaccinated but would be a surprise to me.
Non-pharmaceutical interventions work extremely well for rabies - stay away from wildlife, bat-proof your house, that's about it. Can't do that with varicella.
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