Rabies

Guest: Ryan Wallace, DVM, MPH, a Veterinarian who leads the Rabies Epidemiology Unit at the CDC’s Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology in the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases  During the course of today’s show, somewhere in the world, six people will have died from rabies. More than 59,000 people die of the virus every year—that’s 1 person every 9 minutes. And the tragic thing is that we know how to treat rabies. People who get the vaccine shots soon after infection generally survive. As a result, only a few people in the US die from rabies each year. But in parts of Africa and Asia, many, many more die because people either don’t have access to the rabies vaccine or can’t afford the high cost of the shots.