At least 42 people have died of rabies in Sindh this year, according to hospital tallies reported by Dawn, roughly double the number recorded in all of 2025, as doctors warn that a preventable disease is killing patients at every step of a failing response chain.
Two more patients died on Monday. Javed, 38, from Hyderabad, died at Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre in Karachi after being bitten on the face four months earlier. Allahbad, 52, referred from Nawabshah, died at Liaquat University Hospital in Hyderabad. Their deaths took this year’s toll to at least 42, counted from the province’s main hospitals. Official counts differ between agencies, and no single authority publishes a definitive running total, but every measure points the same way: provincial health data recorded more than 200,000 dog-bite cases in the first nine months of 2026, the Pakistan Medical Association counted 285,000 bites across Sindh in 2025, and Hyderabad’s hospitals treated 63 percent more bite patients this year than last.
Rabies is almost always fatal once symptoms appear, and almost always preventable before them. That is what makes the pattern in this year’s cases so damning, doctors say: many of the dead did seek treatment.
Bazla, 17, a college student from Orangi Town in Karachi, was bitten on the thumb by a street dog while playing badminton outside her home. Her family took her immediately to a government hospital in Orangi, which did not have the medicine. At a private hospital in Nazimabad, staff gave her a partial treatment the family had to buy themselves and told her she did not need to return. She died. “We buried our sister today,” her elder brother Aliyan told Dawn. “We are still in shock and feel frustrated that we couldn’t save her life despite taking her immediately to a government hospital.”
An official review of five deaths in three weeks in July and August — among them Shahnawaz, 48, of Shahdadpur, and Farman, 5, of Kotri — found wounds that were never properly examined, vaccine administered without the rabies immunoglobulin that severe bites require, and basic protocol failures, including a child’s head wound that was reportedly not examined at a major hospital. Sindh’s chief secretary, Asif Hyder Shah, suspended seven health workers and demanded explanations from seven hospital heads. Investigations are continuing into six people who died despite having been vaccinated, among them Naimatullah, 38, of Diplo in Tharparkar, who received four vaccine doses at his local hospital but whose original wound, doctors found, had apparently never been properly cleaned. The year’s first victim, an eight-year-old girl from Jhol in Sanghar district, died in January after treatment at several public facilities that was incomplete and missing immunoglobulin.
The province’s dog-control effort has not kept pace. The Rabies Control Program Sindh, a project costing Rs 963 million, had used only about 31 percent of its budget by October 2025, and had sterilised about 19,449 dogs and vaccinated about 30,729 — far below the World Health Organization benchmark of vaccinating 70 percent of the dog population to break transmission. An Indus Hospital study cited by the Pakistan Medical Association detected rabies virus in 64 percent of sampled dog-bite wounds in Karachi, a sign, doctors say, of how widely the virus circulates in the city’s strays.
The Sindh government says it has upgraded 278 anti-rabies units to WHO standards, administered 138,000 vaccine doses and about 5,000 doses of immunoglobulin, and launched an online dashboard and a 1122 helpline to track cases and stocks. Opposition lawmaker Taha Ahmed Khan of the MQM-P alleged on World Rabies Day that anti-rabies vaccine was still unavailable at many government hospitals and demanded it be stocked free at every public facility. The Pakistan Medical Association’s Karachi president, Dr Mirza Ali Azhar, argues the priority should now be removing stray dogs from streets to shelters, while animal-welfare groups and the official programme favour catch, neuter, vaccinate and return. Karachi Mayor Murtaza Wahab has said the neutering policy “did not deliver the desired results” and that the city council will decide the way forward.
What happens next will be decided in budgets and in hospital emergency rooms. Doctors at Indus Hospital and JPMC, which together treat tens of thousands of bite patients a year, say the cheapest fixes are the oldest ones: wash every wound, examine it, complete the vaccine course, and give immunoglobulin for severe bites.
If you are bitten: wash the wound with soap and running water for at least 15 minutes, do not apply chilli, oil or herbal pastes, and go to a hospital the same day. Rabies can be prevented after a bite, but only before symptoms begin.
Sources: Dawn, October 20, 2026; The News, August 29, 2026 (suspensions) and “Rabies: A global fatal threat” (government response); Pakistan Medical Association briefing reported by Medical News Pakistan, September 16, 2026; provincial health data reported by Particle News, September 28, 2026; World Health Organization rabies guidance.
