Pakistan is reportedly short of hundreds of thousands of doses of anti-rabies vaccine with growing numbers of stray dogs leaving dozens of people with potentially deadly bites each day.

Health officials in the province of Sindh said doctors in the city of Karachi were seeing as many as 150 dog bite cases a day and 11 people have died so far this year.

The country is short of at least 800,000 doses of vaccine which can be given to dog bite victims after they have been bitten, Dawn newspaper reported.

The shortage was disclosed amid similar shortfalls in neighbouring India where public hospitals across the country are reported to be lacking life-saving vaccines.

Rabies kills around 60,000 people a year and is present in more than 150 countries, but is considered a neglected disease mainly affecting the rural poor.

The virus is spread almost always by dog bites and once it reaches the nervous system and victims start to display symptoms, the disease is nearly always fatal. Survival can depend on prompt washing of the wound and vaccination after a bite.

“An 11-year-old boy, Kashif Sohrab, suffering from rabies was brought from Thatta to our hospital last week and died within hours,” Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre’s Executive Director Dr Seemin Jamali told Dawn.