Hospitals and health institutions across Sudurpaschim Province have run short of anti-rabies vaccines for the past two weeks, leaving people bitten by dogs, jackals and other animals scrambling for one of the most time-sensitive treatments in medicine.
The provincial government had allocated Rs 1 million to procure rabies vaccines, a sum that lasted only until about two months ago before stocks began running out. Government hospitals normally provide the vaccine free of charge, but with supplies short, patients are now being forced to buy doses from private hospitals and health facilities at their own expense. The province’s Social Development Ministry has written to health offices, district hospitals and local governments asking them to arrange vaccines on their own.
The crisis is not confined to the far west. The shortage has spread nationwide, with even Kathmandu’s Sukraraj Tropical and Infectious Disease Hospital, the country’s main referral centre for rabies, running critically low. The hospital, which once administered anti-rabies vaccines around the clock, has stopped giving second doses from its emergency unit and now asks patients to return during regular outpatient hours. The Epidemiology and Disease Control Division has appealed to the World Health Organisation for urgent doses, and the Bagmati provincial health logistics centre, which bought 7,000 doses after the federal government failed to supply them, has reported that it too is running out.
The stakes are unusually high because rabies is almost always fatal once symptoms appear, yet entirely preventable if a bite victim receives prompt post-exposure vaccination. The World Health Organisation estimates the disease kills tens of thousands of people a year, with dogs responsible for the overwhelming majority of human infections and a disproportionate share of victims being children. Nepal records dozens of rabies deaths annually, almost all of them among people who did not get timely or complete vaccination, which is exactly the gap a supply shortage threatens to widen.
The timing is also awkward for the government’s own commitments. Nepal has pledged to eliminate human deaths from dog-mediated rabies by 2030, a target that depends on two things working in tandem: mass dog vaccination to cut transmission at the source, and a reliable, free supply of human vaccines for bite victims. The recurring stockouts, now visible from Kanchanpur to Kathmandu, point to a procurement and distribution system in which the federal government’s failure to supply doses on time forces provinces to improvise with their own limited budgets. With monsoon season approaching, a period that typically sees a rise in stray-animal encounters, a continued shortage could cost lives that simple, low-cost treatment would otherwise save.
