Bolstering human rabies surveillance in Africa is crucial to eliminating canine-mediated rabies.

Canine rabies has been controlled or eliminated in most developed countries through mass dog vaccination programs. However, the transmission of rabies to humans continues to be a formidable public health problem in many developing countries, where unvaccinated dogs continue to be a substantial reservoir of human disease. Globally, rabies causes an estimated 59,000 human deaths each year, particularly in Asia (approximately 35,000 deaths) and Africa (21,000−25,000 deaths) [1,2]. However, these estimates are derived from projected dog bite incidence rates and other estimated factors for individual countries, and though they are many times higher than the rabies incidence rates reported by the national authorities of these countries, they likely do not accurately reflect the true burdens of the disease [3]. Together with a lack of disease awareness in vulnerable communities (particularly rural and impoverished ones) and a lack of political will to address rabies control, unreliable surveillance data contributes to a cycle of neglect in countries where the disease burden is highest [1,4,5]. Yet the means exist to bring rabies under control in countries where it continues to be endemic. Recognizing this, the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the Global Alliance for Rabies Control (GARC) have proposed a feasible, strategic global plan to end canine-mediated human rabies by 2030 [6–8]. Examples of successful rabies control can be found in many parts of Latin America, where large-scale, nationally mandated dog vaccination campaigns in most countries across the region have greatly reduced the numbers of dog cases, human cases, and human deaths [9]. Sporadic vaccination campaigns began in the 1970s in the larger cities in Latin America, for example, with over 200,000 dogs vaccinated in Mexico in 1970 [10]. Yet even as vaccination programs continued to gradually increase in the country, with over 1 million vaccine doses/year administered in Mexico by 1980, they remained insufficient because dog and human rabies case numbers continued to occur at much the same pace in the 1970s and 1980s. Two political developments can be linked to the beginning of measurable progress in rabies control: the recognition that rabies is a public health problem, rather than an agricultural one, which resulted in sustained national budgets for rabies control and the collective pledge made by many Latin American countries in 1983 and supported by the Pan American Health Organization to eliminate human rabies by 2005 [11]. With these international commitments and sustained mass dog vaccination programs with newly developed inactivated cell-culture rabies vaccines having improved immunogenicity and availability, human rabies cases eventually began to decline. Though the 2005 goal was not met, human rabies