Document is current

Article History

Received: 4 February 2019

Accepted: 28 February 2020

First Online: 6 March 2020

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: The study was approved by “Ethics committee of One health” (ministry of Agriculture). Rabies is notifiable disease and public good in Uganda. All affected individuals are supposed to report Suspected cases to the district veterinary officers, who communicates to the commissioner Animal health. At this level, the ministry is expected to provide rabies vaccines to the affected districts to embark on a vaccination exercise. Informed verbal consent was obtained from enrolled participants after presenting the purpose and methods to be used in this study by district veterinary officer. This procedure was approved by the ethics committee and it’s the most commonly used approach for data collection in Ugandan local communities. There was no experimentally infected animal in the study. All targeted animals were privately owned, suspected to be rabid and exhibited typical and advanced stage of rabies symptoms.Informed verbal consent to collect samples was obtained either from dog owners, Uganda wild life authority, livestock keepers and communities in the case of straying dogs exhibiting suspected rabies signs. This methodology was also supported and approved by the ethics committee.Before interviewing participants, community meetings with local area leaders and the veterinary officers were organized. The objectives of the study were presented to the community, since such areas were already known by the ministry to be hot spots for rabies in Uganda. The participants acknowledged that rabies is a public health threat and needed support.Some parents were too busy for paper-works but expressed their willingness to participate by allowing their family members to be interviewed by our team. In this case the parents provided a verbal informed consent, because of their busy schedules far away from their resident communities. This procedure was supported and approved by the One Health ethics committee.

: Not applicable.

: All authors certify that they do not have competing interest for the past five years, have not received any funding or salary from any organization that may in way gain or lose financially from the publication of this manuscript either now or in the future, do not hold any shares or stocks in an organization that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of this manuscript, either now or in the future, do not hold or are not currently applying for any patents relating to the content of the manuscript and, do not have any financial competing interest and no non-financial competing interests in relation to this paper neither received reimbursements, fees, funding, or salary from an organization that holds or has applied for patents relating to the content of the manuscript.