Rabies outbreak in Bali

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Vaccinated puppies at the Bali Animal Welfare Association (Photo: Alex Gallafent)

The US goverment has issued travel advisories for Americans visiting Bali in recent months. It’s not because of potential terrorist attacks on the Indonesian island. The concern is an outbreak of rabies. Now one American woman has been working with local authorities to help control the problem. The World’s Alex Gallafent has the story. Download MP3

• Bali Animal Welfare Association
• CDC outbreak notice

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LISA MULLINS: The US government has issued travel advisories for Americans visiting Bali in recent months. It’s not because of potential terrorist attacks on the Indonesian island. The concern is an outbreak of rabies. Now one American woman has been working with local authorities to help control the problem. The World’s Alex Gallafent has the story.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  Rabies was confirmed in Bali in late 2008, after centuries of the island being free of the disease. It’s thought that an infected dog was brought over on a boat from another part of Indonesia. Since then, rabies has become a serious problem here.

JANICE GIRADI:  People are dying of rabies in Bali.

GALLAFENT: Janice Giradi is an American jewelry designer living in Bali. She’s also a committed animal lover, so much so that, even before rabies hit, she founded the Bali Animal Welfare Association, or BAWA.

GIRADI: You know on the side I’d rescue puppies, bring them into my jewelry office, where there were 70 employees in the main office and it got to be a bit much, so we started a free clinic, we started spay-neuter programs, education programs and then when rabies hit the island I was really thrown into that completely.

GALLAFENT: Rabies has now killed more than 40 people on Bali. The disease had spread so quickly in part because of the sheer number of dogs on the island, around 600,000. That’s about one dog for every seven people. And all those dogs are generally free-roaming. Dia Octaviana is a hotel worker in Tanjung Benoa, on Bali’s southern coast. She says Balinese, who are mostly Hindu, care deeply about animals, dogs included.  But they have less sentimental feelings about dogs than, say, Americans.

DIA OCTAVIANA: For us, even though you have the dog as a pet you don’t really having them for walk or for looking after, either they let go or just to keep, it doesn’t really matter for them.

GALLAFENT: So when people here started dying from dog bites, Octaviana says, many Balinese were okay with the local government’s response, a cull.

OCTAVIANA: The connection with the dog and the owner is not really close, so if they know that the dog is infected, the response to kill the dog is not as big impact as to compare when you kill dog in western life.

GALLAFENT: Authorities killed approximately 100,000 dogs, poisoning them strychnine. But it was ineffective. Other infected dogs simply moved into the territory cleared by the cull. Experts outside Bali urged the local government to try a different approach. The systematic vaccination of the island’s dogs. And Janice Giradi persuaded Balinese leaders to let her try a pilot program in one part of the island. Last year, her group administered vaccines to about 12,000 dogs, marking them with collars. Some were brought to the BAWA clinic on Monkey Forest Road in the central town of Ubud.

GIRADI:  Hi, my sweetheart. This is Mia. She was born blind. I found her as a puppy in a rat-infested flooded market and I’m so lucky that I found her because she is just he most loving, joyful, kind, soulful animal, and this is little Emma and Bella.

GALLAFENT: And these are all vaccinated?

GIRADI: They are all vaccinated.

GALLAFENT: Mia, Emma and Bella take turns licking Janice Giradi’s face.

GIRADI: You know they’re mostly pretty scared of people, semi-feral. Personally they’re dingo 40, 50 percent dingo, and so they have this wonderful, wild independent streak. Oh, my goodness. Don’t be jealous, don’t be jealous.

GALLAFENT: The pilot program has now been expanded to cover the entire island, thanks in part to funding from the World Society for the Protection of Animals and the Australian government. Helen Scott-Orr is an Australian animal disease control specialist. She’s leading a research program looking at Indonesia’s ability to respond to emergencies such as this one.

HELEN SCOTT-ORR: So when rabies entered Bali this was an opportunity to use it as a case study for system improvement in Indonesia as a whole. And that obviously has an enormous benefit to Indonesia, but it also has a long-term benefit to Australia as an insurance policy against our neighboring country becoming infected with severe animal diseases.

GALLFENT: Janice Giradi’s Bali Animal Welfare Association became an insurance policy of sorts for a Hollywood film crew recently in Bali. Eat Pray Love was filmed in some rabies-positive areas.

GIRADI: We met with them and they said oh my gosh, please help us. Come into the sets where we’re filming, catch any animals, vaccinate them. We relocate them to a safe location.

GALLAFENT: Giradi says the author of Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert, thanked BAWA by allowing the group to adopt its own version of the book’s title. It now goes by the slogan, Feed, Spay, Love. For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent, Bali.

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