MATT CAWOOD
AFTER 100 years of trickling through Indonesia, rabies has arrived at Australia’s back gate.
In 1997, the disease made its way onto the Indonesian island of Flores, 300 kilometres from the Australian mainland and linked by a chain of islands to West Papua, where it is now causing 5-10 human deaths a year.
From Flores it is a short step east, via fishing and trade boats, to Timor and West Papua.
Two years ago rabies moved west from Flores to Bali, where 40 people have already died from the disease.
“If it gets into Papua, there will be nothing to stop it getting to Torres Strait. It will take some time, but it will get there, and then via the traditional communities down to northern Australia,” said Dr Helen Scott-Orr, former NSW Chief Veterinary Officer and leader of an Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) veterinary project in Indonesia.
Rabies has proved difficult to eradicate anywhere, Dr Scott-Orr said, but Australia’s wild dog and feral pig populations, and the country’s geography, will make it doubly difficult to do so here.
A disease that can affect any warm-blooded animal, rabies is almost always transmitted by a bite.
The rabies virus causes an inflammation of the brain that irritates and then maddens the animal, so that species normally benign to humans - skunks, coyotes, bats - will attack anything in their sight.
For humans, the greatest threat comes from their traditional companion, the dog. Some of civilisation’s earliest literature records rabid dog attacks, and it is dogs that are spreading the disease in Indonesia.
In Flores, Dr Scott-Orr told the recent Global Biosecurity conference in Brisbane, dogs are everywhere - as guards, ceremonial mascots, lucky companions on long fishing trips, and as meals.
Before the rabies outbreak, and the Muslim authorities’ failed attempts to eradicate dogs in disease-affected areas against the wishes of the Flores people, the island carried more than 600,000 dogs.
Source: http://sl.farmonline.com.au
