Rabies vaccines: WHO position paper

Overview

In accordance with its mandate to provide guidance to Member States on health-policy matters, WHO issues a series of regularly updated position papers on vaccines and combinations of vaccines against diseases that have an international public health impact.

These papers are concerned primarily with the use of vaccines in large-scale immunization programmes; they summarize essential background information on diseases and vaccines, and conclude with the current WHO position on the use of vaccines in the global context. The papers have been reviewed by a number of experts within and outside WHO, and since 2006 they have been reviewed and endorsed by the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization.

The position papers are designed for use mainly by national public health officials and managers of immunization programmes. However, they may also be of interest to international funding agencies, the vaccine manufacturing industry, the medical community, scientific media and the public. This article incorporates the most recent developments in the field of human rabies vaccines, in particular with regard to immunization schedules, and replaces the position paper on rabies vaccines published in the Weekly Epidemiological Record in December 2007.