Salah Hammami

TL;DR: This study confirms that all dogs (even those less than 3 months of age) must be vaccinated during mass campaigns and confirms that the expected protection conferred by locally produced potent vaccines reaches 79-99% based on the age of the dogs.

TL;DR: Two bait delivery systems for the oral immunization of dogs against rabies were tested in small scale field trials in a semi-rural area in Tunisia: bait delivery to owned dogs during door to door visits of households (door to door baiting) and distribution of baits on transect lines (transect line baiting).

TL;DR: The protective effect of the lyophilised SAG2 oral vaccine bait DBL2, already demonstrated on laboratory dogs, needed to be verified on common Tunisian dogs, and only two vaccinated dogs exhibited a significant neutralising antibody response after vaccination and before the challenge, and four after the challenge.

TL;DR: Five Tunisian strains were shown to exhibit the same pattern as strains isolated in France, and monoclonal antibody profiles and restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis of the 16S-23S rRNA spacer region showed that they were C. abortus.

TL;DR: The evaluated a dog owner, participation-based, bait delivery system for the oral immunization of dogs against rabies in a semirural area of northern Tunisia demonstrated the potential of dog owner based bait delivery, particularly if the human population is accustomed to mass immunization in defined centers.