Intervet/Schering-Plough Animal Health continues to support the Afya Serengeti rabies project

In a bid to raise more funds for the fight against rabies, the children of Schering-Plough employees all over the world are being invited to dust off their felt tip pens to design the official World Rabies Day 2009 T-shirt.

Proceeds from the sales of this specially designed T-shirt will be donated to the global rabies campaign.

Intervet/Schering-Plough Animal Health has a long history in campaigning against rabies by supporting the Afya Serengeti project in Tanzania since 2003, donating hundreds of thousands doses of rabies vaccine each year as well as by helping to fund-raise for World Rabies Day.

Rabies kills approximately 100 children each day. Including adults, the annual death toll for this horrible disease rises to more than 55,000.

Afya Serengeti started as a research project in 1997 led by Dr. Sarah Cleaveland from the Centre of Tropical Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and developed into a major rabies control program that works with local people in the Serengeti in Tanzania to ensure widespread vaccination of domestic dogs.

A vaccination zone has been set up around the Serengeti National Park with regular clinics for dog owners to bring their pets to be registered and vaccinated. As a result of this campaign, the number of people requiring hospital care for bites from rabid dogs has dropped by 82%.

To extend the efforts to eradicate rabies on a global scale, World Rabies Day aims to raise awareness of the impact of human and animal rabies, how easy it is to prevent, and how to eliminate the main global sources of the disease.

Peter Oostenbach, responsible for global sponsoring at Intervet/Schering-Plough Animal Health and heading the international T-shirt campaign, comments: “We really believe in these initiatives and have supported them globally for a number of years now. The Afya Serengeti initiative is a clear example of how vaccination can work to eradicate disease and save lives.”

For more information about the campaigns, visit www.afya.org and www.worldrabiesday.org