PESHAWAR, April 20: Experts at a workshop on Wednesday stressed the need for legislation to check the spread of rabies. The government had constituted a federal technical advisory-cum-inter-sector coordination committee to implement the national plan for rabies control, said Dr Fayyaz Ali, the focal person for rabies control in the NWFP.

The workshop was organized by the National Institute of Health (NIH), Islamabad, the provincial health department and the World Health Organization at the veterinary institute to discuss measures for adopting policies for pet legislation and elimination and disposal of stray dogs.

He said the federal health director-general, the NIH executive director and representatives of the information, education, interior, agriculture and livestock, environment, and local government and rural development ministries and the provincial governments were members of the committee.

He a subcommittee had been formed to formulate guidelines and strategies for the implementation of the objectives of the national plan for rabies control and prevention.

He said rabies affected about 10,000 people in the NWFP in a year and there was a need to eliminate stray dogs.

He asked doctors to wash the wounds of dog-bite victims immediately and leave those unstitched. He said that the victims need to be administered two kinds of injections for providing immediate treatment and for future protection as the incubation period of rabies could vary from nine days to seven months.

Dr Ali said that a dog-bite victim, if left unvaccinated, would end up suffering from hydrophobia, which ultimately lead to death. He said most of such deaths went unreported.

Citing WHO guidelines, he said any dog that bites a person should be tied for 10 days to ascertain whether it was mad or normal. However, experience suggested that the method was difficult to practise, he said.

He said strychnine, the poison which the civic bodies used to kill stray dogs, was expensive and the process was risky.

He said the process of disposing of the killed dogs needed special attention.

The best solution lay in making the streets safe by eliminating pie-dogs, he said. He said the vaccines should be stored at the required temperature.

He advised people to vaccine their pet dogs so that they might not get rabid.

Prof Masoodur Rehman of the Lady Reading Hospital screened a film on rabies.

Casualty medical officers, paramedics, laboratory technicians and representatives of local government, the education department and media attended the workshop.