Abstract
IN an interesting leading article, the Lancet (628, Nov. 11, 1944) directed attention to the need for the existing regulations designed to prevent the reintroduction of rabies into Great Britain. The law requires that all dogs imported, by air or otherwise, shall be quarantined for six months; strict insistence on this regulation would prevent the reappearance in Britain of this serious disease. Rabies is primarily a disease of dogs, cats and allied species; but it is communicable to man and to domesticated animals by the bite of a 'mad' dog. It was first recorded in Great Britain in A.D. 1000; but it probably existed here before that date. In the middle of the eighteenth century it raged among dogs in London and elsewhere. In the nineteenth century it broke out among several packs of fox-hounds, and some thirty-six persons a year died of rabies. By 1902 rabies had been eradicated from Great Britain by stringent control measures, and it did not reappear for sixteen years. By then (see Stockman, S., Vet, Record, 32, 135; 1929, quoted by the Lancet, loc. cit.) the public was so unfamiliar with the disease that some sections of it failed to realize the dangers of its reintroduction, and the abnormal conditions of that time doubtless helped its spread.
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Control of Rabies. Nature 155, 387 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/155387b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/155387b0