Royapuram residents of Chennai woke up to the horrific menace of stray dogs on Wednesday, November 22. A stray dog bit 29 people including five children on the GA road of Royapuram in north Chennai on Wednesday morning. The wounds inflicted on them included scratches from the dog’s nails. The affected residents were rushed to Stanley Medical College and Hospital, where they were treated for dog bites and discharged on the same day.
Speaking to TNM, Dr Chandrasekhar, Head of the Medicine Department at the Stanley Hospital, said that the patients had category 3 and category 2 bites.“The patients were given intravenous anti-rabies immunoglobulin therapy to prevent the virus from spreading from wounds. To avoid possible infection, they were also given anti-rabies vaccine and tetanus toxoid injections,” he noted.
Read: Chennai apartment residents panic after rabid dog attack, turn ire on other dogs
Bite wounds fall into three categories. No impact on the skin falls under Category 1, while small scrapes without bleeding fall under Category 2. One or many bites that had punctured the skin and saliva entered to human body from a dog fall under category 3. Out of 29, three patients had category 3 deep bites.
Eventually, the GA Road residents themselves managed to kill the dog that had gone wild. Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) personnel later recovered the corpse and sent it to Madras Veterinary College for post-mortem. “Post mortem was done. We are yet to get the reports. If the dog was found infected with rabies, then all the patients will be monitored by the medical team,” Chandrasekhar added.
Further to check whether other dogs in the locality are infected with rabies, GCC has caught 25 dogs from the Royapuram and extracted samples to run tests. Speaking to TNM, Dr. J Kamal Hussain, GCC veterinary officer, said that the dogs that were captured would be released based on their behavioral pattern. "So far there was only one stray dog that bit humans, but since killed. However, we cannot risk anything. So we captured all the stray dogs from that locality and put them under observation. Dogs that show behavioral changes will be kept in observation homes. The rest of the dogs will be administered with anti-rabies vaccination (ARV) and sterilisation before they are released," Hussain revealed.
Lack of human resources to tackle the stray dog issues and a small number of Animal Birth Control (ABC) centres to sterilise the dogs in the city led to such awful situations, citizens complain. As of now, out of five ABC centres, Pulianthope, Llyod's colony and Kannammapet centres are under modernisation process under Singara Chennai 2.0 project.
Chennai residents also urged the GCC to conduct a dog census to estimate the number of stray dogs in the GCC and also chalk out plans to tackle such alarming incidents. It is to be noted that the last dog census was conducted in the city in 2018. The new census is scheduled to take place by the end of this year.