BANGALORE: The cost of anti-rabies vaccine for a five-dose course may soon come down to Rs. 300 from the present Rs. 2,000, across the country. The governments of Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Kerala have initiated measures in this direction.

This follows the Union Government's approval of an initiative by a team of Bangalore-based doctors who have discovered a new technique to inject the vaccine under the skin instead of into the muscles, which is the method being followed now.

S.N. Madhusudana, Additional Professor, Department of Neurovirology of NIMHANS (National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences) said that B.J. Mahendra, president of the Association for Prevention and Control of Rabies in India and a professor at the Kempegowda Institute of Medical Sciences, and himself had pioneered the technique.

Dr. Madhusudana, whose laboratory is a WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Rabies, told The Hindu that a set of Bangalore Mahanagara Palike doctors were being trained in administering the vaccine. The doctors at Victoria Hospital, which reported around 100 cases of dog bites a day, would also be trained shortly, he said.

The intra-dermal route technique requires much less of the vaccine than the intra-muscular method. Instead of 8 ml, just one ml of the vaccine would be enough, he said.

The technique would make the vaccine course more affordable, especially for the poor who constituted a majority of the dog bite victims, he said.

The first step in the case of a dog bite was to immediately wash the wound with soap and water and apply an antiseptic. A five-dose vaccination course had to be taken on days zero, three, seven 14 and 28, Dr. Madhusudana said.

Dr. Madhusudana, who is also chairman of the Rabies in Asia Foundation (RIA), said new approaches to eradicate rabies in the subcontinent were under consideration. One of them was to administer vaccines to dogs through oral baits. Once immunity levels among a given dog population reached 70 per cent, the spread of the disease was expected to stop fully.

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