These barking dogs bite: 60 children attacked by canines every hour in India

Union Minister for Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Rajiv Ranjan Singh Alias Lalan Singh told the Lok Sabha on Tuesday that 22 lakh dog bite cases were reported across India in 2024.

In his written reply, Singh said 37 deaths occurred due to dog bites last uear while the total number of cases was 21,95,122.

5,04,728 other animal attack cases took place in the country in the same period of time, resulting in 11 deaths, Singh also said.

Among the total number of dog bite cases, more than five lakh victims were children under 15.

Three in every four animal bites are due to dogs, with over 5,700 deaths in humans estimated to occur each year due to rabies in India, according to a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)-study conducted a nationwide community-based survey from March, 2022 to August, 2023, covering 60 districts in 15 states.

Over 78,800 households involving 3,37,808 individuals were interviewed about animal bites in the family, anti-rabies vaccination and deaths due to animal bite.

Researchers, including those from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)-National Institute of Epidemiology, Chennai, found that three in every four animal bites was a dog bite. Over 2,000 of those surveyed reported a history of animal bite -- 76.8 per cent of which (1,576) were dog bites.

Further, over 6000 people might be experiencing an animal bite, "translating into 9.1 million bites nationally", the authors said.

"We estimated 5,726 human rabies deaths occurring annually in India," they wrote.

The estimates can help understand whether the country is on track to meeting the global target of eliminating dog-mediated cases of rabies among humans by 2030, the authors said.

"Zero by 30" was launched in 2018 by the World Health Organization and collaborators.

However, reliable and recent estimates of deaths in humans due to rabies are not available in India, where a third of global cases occur, the researchers said.

They added that while cases of rabies deaths have declined over the past two decades, "India needs to fast-track its actions by adopting a focused one-health approach".

"Integrating human and animal surveillance, ensuring timely administration of full course of post-exposure prophylaxis, and accelerating dog vaccination across the country are crucial steps towards this goal," the authors wrote.

The authors also found that among the people who had been bitten by a dog (1,576), over a fifth did not receive an anti-rabies vaccination, while two-thirds (1,043) received at least three doses.

Nearly half of the 1,253 individuals who received one dose did not complete their full course of vaccination, the team said.

With PTI inputs