A retrospective review of rabies post-exposure prophylaxis queries, South Africa, 2016-2019

The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICDs) of South Africa (SA) provides technical support to healthcare workers (HCWs) with regard to infectious diseases through the NICD clinician hotline. Queries to the hotline are often about rabies prophylaxis. An analysis of these queries may help to identify knowledge gaps amongst HCWs regarding prevention of rabies in humans in SA.

A retrospective descriptive review was conducted to analyse rabies post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) queries received by the NICD from 01 January 2016 to 31 December 2019.

A total of 4655 queries were received by the NICD clinician hotline for the study period, of which 2461 pertained to rabies PEP (52.87%). The largest number of calls were placed by HCWs (n = 2313/2437; 94.9%). Queries originated mainly from Gauteng (n = 912/2443; 37.3%) and KwaZulu-Natal (n = 875/2443; 35.8%) provinces. A total of 50 different types of animals were related to exposures involving humans. Dogs (67.7%) and cats (11.8%) were the animals most frequently reported and exposure category III was most common (88.6%). Approximately equal numbers of callers were advised active management of administering rabies PEP and conservative management of withholding PEP. This did not seem to be affected by the exposure category related to the call.

This analysis shows the ongoing demand by HCWs for technical support regarding patient management following potential exposure to rabies. Gaps in HCWs rabies knowledge provide unique learning points on guiding training to achieve the goal of eliminating dog-mediated human rabies deaths by 2030.