Cost-effectiveness of One Health interventions for rabies elimination: a systematic review

The 'One Health' (OH) approach is the most promising idea in realising the global goal of eliminating canine-mediated human rabies by 2030. However, taking an OH approach to rabies elimination can mean many different things to different people. We conducted a systematic review scrutinizing economic evaluations (EEs) retrieved from MEDLINE OVID, Embase OVID, Global Health OVID, CINAHL EBSCO and ECONLIT EBSCO that used the OH approach with the intent of identifying cost-effective sets of interventions that can be combined to implement an optimal OH-based rabies elimination program and highlight key gaps in the knowledge base. Our review suggests that an optimal OH program to tackle rabies should incorporate mass dog vaccination and integrated bite case management in combination with efficient use of post-exposure prophylaxis along with a shift to a 1-week abbreviated intradermal rabies vaccine regimen in humans. We recommend that future EEs of OH interventions for rabies elimination should be performed alongside implementation research to ensure proposed interventions are feasible and adopt a wider societal perspective taking into account costs and outcomes across both the human health and animal welfare sectors. The systematic review has been registered with PROSPERO.