Rabies In The Philippines Essay

INTRODUCTION

The current society is developing and enhancing at an incredibly fast-rate most especially on the health sector. This is evident on the development of drugs and vaccines to remedy several diseases, advancement of medical technology through production of efficient machineries, and improving disease diagnosis and discoveries. Despite this, as people advance further across this era of technology, they tend to be blinded of their ideals and goals for the society which pushes them to disregard the prevalent pressing issues. As a result, a view of countless days of humanity continues to fade slowly for such negligence to existing diseases that continuously decrease the population of other parts of the world.

One of the most animal-related challenges that the world faces today is rabies. According to Vitalich (2014), “Rabies, one of the oldest and deadliest diseases known to man such that it is a zoonotic disease caused by a lyssavirus. All warm-blooded animals are susceptible to this virus and it is a common disease in land-living mammals throughout the world. The disease

Moreover, the Philippine Department of Health (2010) claims, “In the Philippines, although rabies is not among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality, rabies is considered a significant public health problem for two reasons: 1) It is one of the most acutely fatal infections and 2) It is responsible for the death of 200-300 Filipinos annually (p. 204).” On the contradictory, Region 4A has been identified as the second region in the Philippines with the most number of rabies exposures after Manila accounting to 102,512 cases in 2015 (Department of Health, 2015). The aforementioned figures only pertains to the reported cases meaning that there are far more people infected with rabies who may not be knowledgeable of the disease and treat it as common