Today, Thursday September 28, 2023, the Institut Pasteur du Cambodge (IPC) is celebrating World Rabies Day (WDR) by organizing education, information and communication (EIC) activities on rabies at its three prevention centers located in Phnom Penh, Battambang and Kampong Cham province. The aim is to make the Cambodian public aware of the transmission and prevention of this disease.

World Rabies Day established by the Global Alliance for Rabies Control (GARC) and recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) every September 28, is a transcendental day to promote the fight against this disease and reinforce awareness about its prevention. Rabies is a zoonotic disease with a fatality rate of 100%. Endemic on several continents, it is estimated that every year 60,000 people in the world die from it, 40% of them are children.

The IPC is one of the country’s leading research organizations. It hosts the reference laboratory for rabies in Cambodia and is also a major provider of vaccination services, in particular for pre- and post-exposure rabies prophylaxis. In 2022, it provided life-saving post-exposure prophylaxis to 63,041 new people potentially exposed to rabies (following a dog or cat bite…), through its three rabies prevention centers.

“All for 1, One Health for All“, the official World Rabies Day 2023 slogan, highlights the need to implement an intersectoral and multidisciplinary approach with the contribution, intervention and cooperation of professional teams from the human, animal, and environmental health sectors in order to archive the global goals of elimination of human rabies death by 2030.

And thanks to a great collaboration between the Instituts Pasteur de Madagascar and du Cambodge, CIRAD has put into practice the One Health approach aimed at achieving the “Zero by 30” objective. 

To find out more about this approach, visit www.cirad.fr.