Comparing Methods of Assessing Dog Rabies Vaccination Coverage in Rural and Urban Communities in Tanzania.

Rabies can be eliminated by achieving comprehensive coverage of 70% of domestic dogs during annual mass vaccination campaigns. Estimates of vaccination coverage are, therefore, required to evaluate and manage mass dog vaccination programs; however, there is no specific guidance for the most accurate and efficient methods for estimating coverage in different settings. Here, we compare post-vaccination transects, school-based surveys, and household surveys across 28 districts in southeast Tanzania and Pemba island covering rural, urban, coastal and inland settings, and a range of different livelihoods and religious backgrounds.

Mobile Phones As Surveillance Tools: Implementing and Evaluating a Large-Scale Intersectoral Surveillance System for Rabies in Tanzania.

Katie Hampson and colleagues describe their experience of developing and deploying a large-scale rabies surveillance system based on mobile phones in southern Tanzania.

Heterogeneity in the spread and control of infectious disease: consequences for the elimination of canine rabies.

Understanding the factors influencing vaccination campaign effectiveness is vital in designing efficient disease elimination programmes. We investigated the importance of spatial heterogeneity in vaccination coverage and human-mediated dog movements for the elimination of endemic canine rabies by mass dog vaccination in Region VI of the Philippines (Western Visayas). Household survey data was used to parameterise a spatially-explicit rabies transmission model with realistic dog movement and vaccination coverage scenarios, assuming a basic reproduction number for rabies drawn from the literature.

Designing programs for eliminating canine rabies from islands: Bali, Indonesia as a case study.

Background: Canine rabies is one of the most important and feared zoonotic diseases in the world. In some regions rabies elimination is being successfully coordinated, whereas in others rabies is endemic and continues to spread to uninfected areas. As epidemics emerge, both accepted and contentious control methods are used, as questions remain over the most effective strategy to eliminate rabies.

Surveillance guidelines for disease elimination: a case study of canine rabies.

Surveillance is a critical component of disease control programmes but is often poorly resourced, particularly in developing countries lacking good infrastructure and especially for zoonoses which require combined veterinary and medical capacity and collaboration. Here we examine how successful control, and ultimately disease elimination, depends on effective surveillance. We estimated that detection probabilities of <0.

On the generality of stability-complexity relationships in Lotka-Volterra ecosystems.

Understanding how complexity persists in nature is a long-standing goal of ecologists. In theoretical ecology, local stability is a widely used measure of ecosystem persistence and has made a major contribution to the ecosystem stability-complexity debate over the last few decades. However, permanence is coming to be regarded as a more satisfactory definition of ecosystem persistence and has relatively recently become available as a tool for assessing the global stability of Lotka-Volterra communities.

Can parasites drive population cycles in mountain hares?

Understanding the drivers of population fluctuations is a central goal of ecology. Although well-established theory suggests that parasites can drive cyclic population fluctuations in their hosts, field evidence is lacking. Theory predicts that a parasite that loosely aggregates in the host population and has stronger impact on host fecundity than survival should induce cycling.