Rabies seems like a relic from the past - something seen in old movies like, To Kill a Mockingbird. McClatchy’s China Rises blog and several medical websites warn travelers about the steep rise in rabies cases found in China.

Beware travelers: There’s an “explosion” of rabies in China.

That determination is from the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention, and anybody traveling in rural China, particularly in the south, should take heed.

The incidence of human rabies cases has spiked this decade from a very low level in the 1990s, and it has spread over much of the country.

A comment on a blog post earlier this week piqued my curiosity. Moreover, my personal physician in Beijing a few months ago strongly encouraged me to get a rabies vaccine (which I haven’t done yet). So I did a little poking around. Turns out that a study released in mid-2008 documents how much rabies has spread.

Science Daily

The authors found that rabies was most frequently encountered in the south-western and southern territories of China, especially in highly populated areas. Lu said “the four rabies-endemic provinces lacked strictly enforced measures to eliminate dog rabies or an ample supply of modern cell culture rabies vaccines for humans”. Most of the patients were children or teenagers, and most contracted the disease after being bitten by a dog, usually on the head and neck. According to the authors, “In the worst-affected province, Guandong, 62.5% of patients did not receive proper treatment on their wounds, 92.5% did not receive adequate post-exposure vaccination and 91.25% did not receive any anti-rabies immunoglobulin”.

SciDev

But Lu Jiahai of China’s Sun Yat-Sen University and colleagues found that in the last four years, only about one-third of patients who died from rabies each year received vaccinations.

Their conclusions are based on analysis of human rabies data in China between 1990 and 2007 and a further analysis of 244 rabies cases in the Guangdong region between 2003 and 2004.

They discovered that of the 244 deaths, 67 per cent did not seek any medical treatment and of the 33 per cent who received PEP, only six received a full regime. These six patients also died, possibly because improper storage reduced the quality of the vaccine or the severity of the bites.

Tim Johnson of China Rises also cautiously directs us to this PDF from Wikileaks, and the graphs that show a cancerous growth of rabies cases spreading through the Middle Kingdom, despite well-publicized efforts at extermination.