Hospitals and medical centres in HCM City have announced that they do not have enough vaccines against rabies.

A patient being vaccinated against rabies. Many health establishments in HCM City lack rabies vaccine.

According to Nguyễn Ngọc Anh Tuấn, deputy director of Clinical Biosafety Clinic at the city-based Pasteur Institute, the vaccine went out of stock in the past few days.

Nguyễn Đức Hải, a resident of Tân Bình District, said he had to go to a third health centre to get the first rabies vaccination, which he had to take four to five times.

Nguyễn Thái Tuyết Nhung, a resident of Thủ Đức District, also said she had to go to a second medical centre for vaccination.

The Việt Nam Vaccine Centre said on Wednesday it just had 1,000 more doses of the rabies vaccine left.

Pasteur Institute, meanwhile, said it had just imported a batch of some 1,000 vaccines.

Tuấn said people should not worry as the incubation period for rabies was some three months.

A person exposed to rabies from dog bites should be monitored and can receive the vaccine a couple of days later, without serious consequences to health, he said.

Việt Nam has set a target of controlling rabies in dogs and eliminating the disease in humans by 2021.

Under the national Programme for Rabies Prevention and Control for the 2017-21 period, the number of provinces with high risk of rabies and number of people who have died of rabies will be reduced by 60 per cent compared to the average figure during 2011-15.

Rabies is a dangerous and infectious viral disease, which spreads to people from infected animals, particularly dogs. According to statistics of the World Health Organisation, 50,000 people in the world die of rabies and more than 10 million are given the rabies vaccination every year. — VNS