Rabies has been known since antiquity, and has been completely preventable since Pasteur developed a vaccine more than a century ago. But the World Health Organization still considers it “a neglected disease of poor and vulnerable populations.”

Why? Rabies, one expert has written, “became a neglected disease when it was eliminated from Europe and North America.”

The vast majority of the estimated 59,000 human deaths each year from rabies are in Africa and Asia, in countries with large populations of free-roaming dogs that provide a so-called reservoir for the virus.