WHO validates Chile as first South American country free of dog-to-human rabies

The World Health Organization on 14 September validated Chile as the first country in South America to have eliminated dog-transmitted rabies as a public health problem. The last recorded dog-to-human case in Chile was in 1972. Health Minister May Chomali and Deputy Health Minister Alejandra Pizarro received the diploma at the Monte Grande kennel in Las Condes during a mobile dog-vaccination round.

Validation is not a press-conference slogan. Chile filed a technical dossier. An independent group convened by PANAFTOSA, the PAHO/WHO centre for foot-and-mouth disease and zoonoses, checked it against WHO criteria: sustained absence of cases, laboratory capacity, surveillance, vaccination coverage and a response system that can stop the virus if it returns. Giovanni Escalante, PAHO/WHO representative in Chile, said Chile is the third country in the world verified as having no endemic circulation of dog-mediated human rabies.

What the country actually did

The programme combined mass pet vaccination, post-exposure shots for people who may have been bitten, door-to-door campaigns, dog-population measures and public education. Municipal governments ran much of the field work. A national technical table assembled decades of records to show that the canine variant has not re-established itself. Rabies remains almost always fatal once clinical signs appear. The point of the Chilean system is to keep those signs from appearing.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the validation reflected decades of work to protect communities and showed what sustained public-health spending can do. PAHO Director Jarbas Barbosa made the same point at regional level. Human cases of dog-mediated rabies in the Americas have fallen by more than 98 percent since 1983. Only a handful of cases are reported in the region each year. Worldwide, WHO still counts nearly 60,000 rabies deaths a year, most of them after dog bites, and lists rabies among 21 neglected tropical diseases that affect about one billion people.

A second NTD mark in the same year

Chile was verified earlier in 2026 for the elimination of leprosy, the first country in the Americas to reach that target. As of September 2026, 65 countries had eliminated at least one neglected tropical disease, seven of them in the Americas. The rabies decision is Chile's second such mark in a single year.

The certificate does not mean rabies has vanished from every Chilean animal. Wildlife cycles can persist. The validation covers dog-to-human transmission as a public-health problem and the state's ability to keep it from coming back. That is why the Las Condes vaccination site was the venue. The ceremony sat inside the same operational work that produced the dossier.

For neighbouring ministries the useful detail is the timeline. Fifty-four years without a dog-to-human case was necessary but not sufficient. WHO wanted proof that labs, surveillance and municipal vaccination would still function if a case appeared tomorrow. Countries that have driven cases close to zero but let those systems thin out will not clear the same bar. Chile's file is now a public template for how that bar is set.