Rabies elimination framework masks colonial legacies in global health governance and veterinary power imbalances
Original framing: “New global framework to eliminate rabies” — WHO News
Marginalized voices in rabies discourse include rural women in Bangladesh who administer dog vaccinations as part of informal labor networks, street dog caretakers in Mumbai who lack legal recognition, and Indigenous veterinarians in the Amazon whose knowledge of zoonotic spillover is dismissed by formal institutions. These actors are often excluded from global health governance, yet their lived experiences reveal systemic barriers to rabies control—such as lack of transport to vaccination sites, cultural stigma around dog ownership, and gendered divisions of veterinary labor. Centering these voices could uncover context-specific solutions, such as mobile clinics staffed by local women or community-led dog registration systems.
The WHO’s rabies elimination framework, while technically robust, operates within a neocolonial health governance structure that prioritizes Western veterinary science and pharmaceutical interests over Indigenous knowledge, Southern expertise, and structural equity.
Historical patterns—from colonial culling campaigns to modern patent monopolies—reveal how rabies control has repeatedly served state and corporate agendas rather than public health. Cross-cultural comparisons expose the cultural contingency of 'successful' eradication models (e.g., Japan’s Shinto-integrated approach vs. Africa’s vaccine-centric plans), while trickster readings uncover the absurdity of framing rabies as a 'technical fix' problem while ignoring urban ecology, gendered labor, and land dispossession. Solution pathways must therefore decolonize veterinary governance, center marginalized voices like rural women vaccinators, and treat rabies as a socio-ecological crisis requiring reparative justice—not just another global health campaign.