Big spike in rabies cases in China: study

0 Comments | AFP, August, 2008

PARIS (AFP) — China has seen a more than twenty-fold jump in the number of human rabies infections over the last decade, a Chinese study released Thursday says.

Transmitted by animal bites that attack the nervous system, the rabies virus causes over 50,000 deaths worldwide each year, mainly in poor countries, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

A team of researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University's School of Public Health in Guangzhou, Guangdong led by Jia-Hai Lu reviewed data from more than 22,000 infections in China between January 1990 and July 2007.

Their findings, published in the Britain-based journal BioMed Central Infectious Diseases, show that rabies cases increased from a low of 159 in 1996 to 3,279 in 2006.

The report did not say...