Residents of the Nunavut community of Kugluktuk are being warned about rabies in the area after a puppy that originated there was diagnosed with the disease in Saskatchewan. It’s not the first time rabies has been transported from a northern community in a dog, and this case should serve as yet another reminder of the risks of transporting diseases with animals (even within Canada). It looks like the puppy was "rescued" from the community and adopted in Saskatchewan. There are a lot of feral and semi-feral dogs in some northern areas, and various groups try to re-home them (with the best of intentions) to more southern communities.

The Deptartment of Health is warning Kugluktuk residents to stay away from dogs that behave strangely, and to make sure that they go to a health centre if bitten or scratched – good advice, although I’d expand it to staying away from all strange dogs, regardless of how they’re behaving.

There are two other important issues that this story brings up. One is vaccination of dogs, which can be difficult in communities that have limited access to veterinary care and/or where many dogs are "community dogs", without a defined owner to take responsibility for their care. Increasing vaccination is important to reduce the risk of rabies transmission, and there are efforts in many areas to do this. The other issue is adoption of animals. While rabies is now  fairly rare in Canada, this isn’t the first time this has happened, so groups that wish to remove animals from northern communities should ensure that the animals are properly vaccinated prior to transportation, and that new owners are warned about the increased risk of rabies (albeit still quite low). You can never 100% prevent disease transmission associated with animal movement, but making sure animals appear healthy before shipping, having good preventive medicine practices in place, and adequately tracking animals after they are shipped are important (and practical) measures to reduce the risk.

This case (and the location of Kugluktuk) can be found on wormsandgermsmap.com