Award for Afya Serengeti campaign

The Afya Serengeti campaign, of which we reported earlier in our blog, has won an Award of Excellence in the category Animal Health. With this award, founded by the RX club, the campaign is honoured for its creativity and execution. The campaign was developed by Circa Healthcare in order of Intervet/Schering-Plough Animal Health, and focuses at the prevention of rabies in the Serengeti area in Tanzania. The campaign supports vaccination teams that vaccinate all domestic dogs in the communities surrounding the Serengeti National Park. We were involved in this campaign through the production of a video-series where we followed these team in their year around vaccination campaign.

Rabies is a lethal disease that still claims more than 25,000 Africans per year, mainly children. While rabies is preventable with vaccination, fighting it is a huge undertaking. The Afya Serengeti project alone encompasses an area inhabited by more than 6 million people and 500,000 domestic dogs.

This Award of Excellence is a fantastic recognition for this sympathetic campaign.

Today is World Rabies Day!

Today, 28 september 2010, is  World Rabies Day. World Rabies Day is an initiative of the Global Allience for Rabies Control and their mission is to raise awareness about the impact of human and animal rabies, how easy it is to prevent it, and how to eliminate the main global sources.

Through a selection events (of which World Rabies Day is one of the annual highlights) WRD has reached over 100 million people and vaccinated over 3 million animals against rabies. Despite that, 50.000 people still die annually of rabies, most of which are children. One of the vaccination campaigns is the Afya Serengeti project of which we reported here before. Aim of this project is to vaccinate all privatly owned dogs that live in the villages and communities surrounding the Serengeti Park in Tanzania. And with succes, as outbreaks of rabies has not been seen in areas where more than 70% of dogs are vaccinated since the start of the campaign in 2003. One of our clients, Intervet/Schering-Plough Animal Health has supported this campaign the last couple of years by donating a dose of rabies to the project for every dose of vaccine sold. We’ve made a videoseries in 2008 about the campaign to give you an impression of the effort made by the team. This campaign was nominated for the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Award 2009 by the Royal Dutch Veterinary Association.

WRD uses various social media tools to promote their activities like Twitter and Facebook. In addition to that they use video and webinars for educational purposes. Today, for examples, they organize throughout the day 4 webinars. Besides that, you can also demonstrate your support to WRD by sending specially developed  Health eCards or by placing special buttons on your website or below your email messages. No matter how small, it’s one step closer to the ultimate goal: a world free of rabies.