- MOSCOW (Reuters) - As if Muscovites did not have enough worries with
job losses, a slumping rouble and emptying stores, officials revealed a
new threat on Tuesday -- rabies. The authorities firmly denied a report
that three people had already died of the disease but issued stern warnings
that the Russian capital faced the most threatening outbreak of rabies
in half a century, partly because cash shortages have bitten into the budget
for preventive measures in surrounding countryside. Some 80 rabid animals
have been identified in Moscow Region around the city so far this year,
officials said, double the figure for the whole of last year and 10 times
what it was three years ago. That has raised fears of an epidemic of the
sort last seen in the chaotic period after World War Two. ``We haven't
had rabies in Moscow city since 1946, when there was an epidemic and they
had to destroy animals because dozens of people died,'' said Sergei Sereda,
director of the Tsentr Veterinary Clinic in central Moscow. Now his busy
surgery is plastered with warnings urging pet owners to have their dogs
and cats vaccinated immediately. ``The situation is dangerously explosive,''
Sereda said. Alexander Tunik of Moscow city council's veterinary service
confirmed that there had been a handful of recorded instances of animals
inside the city with the disease in recent months. All of these, however,
had been infected when their owners had taken them to the countryside over
the summer, when millions of Muscovites retreat to their garden plots known
as dachas. ``We don't have true rabies in the city yet. And, thank God,
it hasn't affected people -- for the time being,'' he said. ``The problem
is in Moscow Region. In the past, it has been controlled by putting oral
vaccines in feed for foxes and other animals. But now they don't have the
funds,'' Tunik told Reuters. The alternative, Sereda said, was for pet
owners to have their own animals vaccinated. But he estimated there may
be more than a million dogs and several million cats in the city of some
12 million people -- only a small proportion had been innoculated even
though it cost as little as $1 dollar. ``Unfortunately there's no law which
forces people to seek this vaccination,'' he said. Adding to the problem
is the large number of stray dogs and cats roaming the streets of the capital.
``These animals move around a lot and so the more strays there are, the
risk goes up geometrically,'' Sereda said. ``The risk of illness is growing
every day. In my 20 years of practice I've never seen anything like it,''
he added. Moscow's populist mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, ran into flak last year
from animal rights campaigners in the West, notably French film star Brigitte
Bardot, over reports that city employees were shooting stray dogs. In fact,
efforts to control the population concentrate on sterilising the strays,
officials say. In 1996, the last year for which figures were available,
eight Russians died of rabies out of 439 who sought medical help after
being bitten by infected animals, official data showed.
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