Rabies deaths recorded in India far lesser than estimates from ICMR-led study
The Health Ministry’s Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme-Integrated Health Information Platform is a disease surveillance system, while the Registrar General of India’s Medical Certification of Cause of Death captures medically certified causes through civil registration — this absence of a complete national count underscores the gaps in India’s rabies mortality surveillance
India recorded far fewer rabies deaths in 2022, 2023, and 2024 than a recent study estimated, according to data from the Union Health Ministry. While the ICMR-National Institute of Epidemiology (ICMR-NIE) study suggested 5,726 annual rabies deaths in India, the Health Ministry's Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme-Integrated Health Information Platform (IDSP-IHIP) reported only 21, 50, and 54 rabies deaths in those years, respectively.
The Registrar General of India's Medical Certification of Cause of Death (MCCD) system recorded 66 and 271 rabies deaths in 2022 and 2023, respectively. However, the MCCD only captures medically certified deaths and does not account for all registered deaths, leading to a discrepancy between the two systems. The Lancet study, which surveyed 337,808 people in 78,807 households across 60 districts in 15 states, estimated that India sees about 9.1 million animal bites annually, including about 5.6 million dog bites.
Despite progress in reducing human rabies deaths over the past two decades, India still accounts for 35% of global rabies deaths and 59.9% of rabies deaths in Asia. The government has acknowledged the surveillance challenge, noting that cases and deaths often occur in areas where they are not measurable. Efforts are ongoing to make human rabies a notifiable disease across India and to accelerate dog vaccination to eliminate dog-mediated human rabies by 2030.
Written by urgent.news from The Hindu - Sci-Tech's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
