China Orders Mandatory Rabies Vaccinations

Looks like rabies is becoming a fairly big problem.

Chinese authorities have ordered all dogs to receive a mandatory inoculation against rabies as the country fights a rising number of human rabies cases, the ministries of Health and agriculture said in a circular on Friday.
By the end of November, China reported 3,010 rabies cases compared with 3,279 in 2006, 2,537 in 2005, and 2,651 in 2004 during the same period, the Ministry of Health figures showed.

Between 2004 and 2006, rabies claimed 8,403 people, accounting for 30.1 percent of the total deaths from infectious disease in the same time period.

"With the increasing number and density of dogs in some cities and rural areas, less than 10 percent were vaccinated against rabies," the circular said.

Oh, and the Host country of the 2008 Olympic games likes to club thousands of dogs to death to deal with this type of problem. From a 2006 article:

Chinese officials killed 50,000 dogs the other day. Just walked along the streets and lured them out of their homes and bushes and doghouses using whistles and firecrackers and then clubbed them to death with giant sticks, right there in the residential streets, tossed the bodies into big dump trucks and drove on.

It was a particularly horrific scene, seemingly unimaginable in our "enlightened" age, a fully sanctioned slaughter ordered up by the local Chinese government in response to the recent deaths of three local people felled by rabies. Without some sort of action, more people could die, the government deduced. Solution: Kill all the dogs. Problem solved, right? Well, not quite.

Now another Shanghai prefecture has ordered the slaughter of all its dogs, too, in response to the rabies-related deaths of 16 people in the past eight months. This particular region has an estimated 500,000 dogs. No word yet on how it plans to kill them all, but the strolling-and-clubbing thing might be the only way, given how even Chinese citizens tend to be slightly uncooperative when it comes to giving up their pets for random government massacre in front of their very eyes.

Barbaric.