AFTER 100 years of trickling through Indonesia, rabies has arrived at Australia’s back gate.
In 1997, the disease made its way onto the Indonesian island of Flores, 300 kilometres from the Australian mainland and linked by a chain of islands to West Papua, where it is now causing 5-10 human deaths a year.
From Flores it is a short step east, via fishing and trade boats, to Timor and West Papua.
Two years ago rabies moved west from Flores to Bali, where 40 people have already died from the disease.
“If it gets into Papua, there will be nothing to stop it getting to Torres Strait. It will take some time, but it will get there, and then via the traditional communities down to northern Australia,” said Dr Helen Scott-Orr, former NSW Chief Veterinary Officer and leader of an Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) veterinary project in Indonesia.
Rabies has proved difficult to eradicate anywhere, Dr Scott-Orr said, but Australia’s wild dog and feral pig populations, and the country’s geography, will make it doubly difficult to do so here.
A disease that can affect any warm-blooded animal, rabies is almost always transmitted by a bite.
The rabies virus causes an inflammation of the brain that irritates and then maddens the animal, so that species normally benign to humans - skunks, coyotes, bats - will attack anything in their sight.
For humans, the greatest threat comes from their traditional companion, the dog. Some of civilisation’s earliest literature records rabid dog attacks, and it is dogs that are spreading the disease in Indonesia.
In Flores, Dr Scott-Orr told the recent Global Biosecurity conference in Brisbane, dogs are everywhere - as guards, ceremonial mascots, lucky companions on long fishing trips, and as meals.
Before the rabies outbreak, and the Muslim authorities’ failed attempts to eradicate dogs in disease-affected areas against the wishes of the Flores people, the island carried more than 600,000 dogs.
Indonesians travel freely between islands with their dogs, Dr Scott-Orr said; while rabies can take anything from a week to six months to incubate in the body and make its way to the brain.
That means that by the time rabies is identified in a new location, it tends to be the tip of an iceberg: the disease has already invisibly spread across new territory.
Flores was unsuccessful at eradicating the disease, and now reports about 1000 rabid dog bites a year.
On closely-settled Bali, despite support from Australia and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, initial attempts at eradication through dog culls and vaccination also failed.
About 20,000 dog bites a year are now reported in Balinese clinics, and 90 per cent of those reported are given treatment against rabies.
Bali is now gearing up for a renewed program with the aim of being rabies-free by 2012, Dr Scott-Orr said.
“The message for Australia is that rabies eradication is very difficult and expensive, but living with this disease is not an option. It’s too risky and its too horrible.”
“It’s strongly in Australia’s interests to help the Indonesians eradicate it, at least from Bali and Flores.”
Dr Scott-Orr urged that Australia also review its own rabies response program.
“The ineffective rabies control responses in Flores and Bali have shown that a number of pre-requisites are required to mount a rapid and effective response to rabies.”
“Currently, Australia lacks many of these.”
Much of the world battles rabies. Australia is one of the exceptions, along with Papua, New Zealand, Japan, Chile and parts of western Europe.
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