CHENNAI — Public Health and Animal Husbandry officials confirmed Tuesday that their decade-long, Rs 120 crore strategy of waiting for dogs to bite citizens before administering medical treatment is operating exactly as intended.

Addressing an April 2025 Madras High Court directive that suggested declaring animal rabies a notifiable disease, authorities warned against adopting rash preventive measures. "If we vaccinate the dogs at the source, as Goa did to eliminate human rabies deaths by 2018, we would severely disrupt our post-exposure supply chains," said a procurement official, noting that the 255 human rabies fatalities recorded over the last ten years are a standard operational outcome of the current model.

The department proudly noted that by strictly avoiding proactive dog vaccination, they have successfully grown state vaccine procurement from 3.87 lakh doses in 2015 to 9.36 lakh doses today. "Preventing the rabies virus at the animal level would require our departments to coordinate and actually track the stray dog population," a health spokesperson explained. "It is much more straightforward to simply let the dogs bite people and process the 5.25 lakh emergency room visits as they arrive."