Data, code, and manuscript files accompanying:
Filla C, Rajeev M, Randriana Z, et al. Lessons learned and paths forward for rabies dog vaccination in Madagascar: a case study of pilot vaccination campaigns in Moramanga District. Accepted in Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases.
Canine rabies causes an estimated 60,000 human deaths per year, but these deaths are preventable through post-exposure prophylaxis of people and vaccination of domestic dogs. Dog vaccination campaigns targeting 70% of the population are effective at interrupting transmission. Here, we report on lessons learned during pilot dog vaccination campaigns in the Moramanga District of Madagascar. We compare two different vaccination strategies: a volunteer driven effort to vaccinate dogs in two communes using static point vaccination, and continuous vaccination as part of routine veterinary services. We used dog age data from the campaigns to estimate key demographic parameters and to simulate different vaccination strategies. Overall, we found that dog vaccination was feasible and that most dogs were accessible to vaccination. The static-point campaign achieved higher coverage, but required more resources and had a limited geographic scope compared to the continuous delivery campaign. Our modeling results suggest that targeting puppies through community-based vaccination efforts could improve coverage. We found that mass dog vaccination is feasible and can achieve high coverage in Madagascar, however context-specific strategies and an investment in dog vaccination as a public good will be required to move the country towards elimination.
All processed data are in data/, and raw geospatial data and the processing script are in data-raw/, although note that not all cost data have been shared. All analyses and functions are in R/.
All figures and tables are in figs/ and analysis outputs are in out/.
The manuscript is written in R Markdown and knit to an MDPI formatted pdf using the rticles::mdpi_article (currently a fork at mrajeev08/rticles@c2a0819, as the template is out of date) output.
This project uses renv to manage package dependencies. To install these dependencies in a project specific library, clone or download this repository, and then use the following command in R:
renv::restore()
To run all the analyses, from within the cloned repository, run R/run_analyses_all.R, i.e. in R:
source("R/run_analyses_all.R")