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Vaccine paucity: HC steps in Shibu Thomas | TNN With a stray dog population of over two lakh and 25,000 dog bites being reported every month, the shortage of anti-rabies vaccine (ARV) stock in Mumbai is threatening to become a major problem. The Bombay High Court has now intervened and ordered the Maharashtra government to explain as to why it directed the city's premier Haffkine Institute to stop producing ARV. A full bench comprising Justices S Radhakrishnan, D B Bhosale and Vijaya Kapse-Tahilramani has also asked the government to place on record by March 9, what it is doing to make such vaccines available to the public at a cheap price. The court's directions have come on a PIL filed by People for Elimination of Stray Troubles (PEST) and contested by a number of animal welfare NGOs to go into the issue of whether to lift the 1994 ban on killing stray dogs. As per a survey by the WHO, one person is bitten every two seconds by a dog (1.70 crore dog bites in a year) in India, while one person dies every 30 minutes in the country from rabies (20,000). In Mumbai, around 35 rabies deaths are reported annually. Since December 2004, the state government has directed Haffkine Institute to stop producing anti-rabies vaccines. The decision was on a recommendation by the WHO to phase out neural tissue vaccines (NTVs) and use only tissue culture vaccines (TCVs) to tackle rabies. Haffkine Bio Pharmaceuticals used to supply over four million units of NTV annually to partly meet the requirement of around 14 million units for state-run hospitals. BMC-run hospitals need 200 units of ARVs every day. TCVs, which have replaced NTVs, are manufactured by private pharma firms like Aventis. But these are expensive. The court has asked the BMC provide details of the amount allocated for sterilisation of dogs in the last five years and details of how the money was used by NGOs. According to animal activists, 40,000 stray dogs have to be sterilised every year, but less than 7,000 are actually sterilised. shibu.thomas1@timesgroup.com BEASTLY TALES URL : http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=VE9JTS8yMDA3LzAyLzIwI0FyMDA1MDQ=&Mode=HTML&Locale=english-skin-custom |
