In Var, a 4-month-old puppy died of rabies on December 29. This information, first reported by La Dépêche Vétérinaire, was confirmed by the Ministry of Agriculture on Tuesday, January 16.
The animal, a very young border collie, had been “illegally imported from Morocco” 13 days earlier, on December 16. The diagnosis of rabies, a disease supposedly absent on our soil, was confirmed by a laboratory in Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle).
Contacts with this deadly disease have already been identified, both in humans and other animals. According France 3 The young dog bit a specialized veterinary assistant. The various authorities contacted by BFMTV.com did not provide information about his condition.
“Rabies is “a systematically fatal disease once symptoms appear, both in humans and animals,” recalls the ministry’s website.
A woman recently died in Reims on October 9, two months after being injured by a wild cat in North Africa. According to the Pasteur Institute, another 60,000 people die each year from this disease worldwide. The deaths were mainly concentrated in Asia and Africa.
Call to vigilance
As the National Order of Veterinarians explains to BFMTV.com, France has been free of rabies for more than two decades:
“Since 2001, a dozen cases of rabies in dogs or cats have been diagnosed in France. Most of the cases were directly or indirectly related to the irregular importation of a dog or cat from a country where this disease is common.
In recent years, contaminated cats and dogs imported from Algeria, Morocco or the Gambia to France have been recorded. Animals that died from their infection or were euthanized, as required by law, unless they had already been vaccinated against rabies.
As the Ministry of Agriculture reminds, “it is prohibited to bring dogs and cats into French territory” if they do not have a “vaccination record and a health certificate issued by the country’s health authorities.”
Source: BFM TV
