A Qualitative Risk Assessment of Rabies Reintroduction Into the Rabies Low-Risk Zone of Bhutan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Bhutan, dog-mediated rabies has been successfully eliminated from most regions of the country but remains endemic in the Southern region and sporadic incursions are also reported in the East. Elimination of rabies from the southern part of Bhutan is challenged by the porous border with the neighboring states of India which facilitates free and unregulated movement of animals. Around 17 outbreaks of rabies are reported annually in dogs and other domestic animals, posing continuous public health risks and economic losses. Furthermore, due to anthropogenic factors, such as increasing human settlements along highways, increased animal transportation, and the complex and changing human-pet relationship, there is potential to reintroduce rabies from rabies high-risk zone to rabies low-risk zone. This study was undertaken to estimate the risk of rabies re-introduction to the rabies low-risk zone by performing a qualitative risk assessment. The assessment was conducted for three risk pathways (stray dog-pathway, pet dog-pathway and cattle-pathway) under two scenarios: (1) no risk mitigation measures in place and (2) current risk mitigation measures in place. The current control measures include Government led programs, such as mass dog vaccination and dog population management, regulation of the movment of animals through pre-travel check-up and health certification, regular awareness education and rabies surveillance in the rabies endemic areas. The probability of an event occurring was assigned using the data from the available literature. Where gaps in knowledge existed, expert opinion, elicited through modified Delphi method, was used. Under the scenario in which no risk mitigation measures were in place, the risk of rabies re-introduction was estimated to be medium for the stray-dog pathway with a low level of uncertainty, low for pet-dog pathway with a low level of uncertainty, and very low for the cattle-pathway with a medium level of uncertainty. When current risk-mitigation measures were included, the risk of rabies reintroduction was estimated to be very low for the stray-dog pathway with a medium level of uncertainty, low for the pet dog-pathway with a low level of uncertainty, and extremely low for the cattle-pathway with a medium level of uncertainty. The risk of rabies re-introduction through all the pathways was greater than negligible. These findings highlight the importance of maintaining and enhancing current risk mitigation measures to prevent re-introduction of rabies into rabies low-risk zone.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".