Our Story
In 2003, Worldwide Veterinary Service (WVS) began on a mission to improve animal welfare around the world. This all started in a vet practice in a small village in Dorset, UK, where Luke Gamble, CEO and founder, started sending aid parcels to charities abroad. As WVS grew, Luke Gamble launched the Mission Rabies project in 2013 to protect people and animals living in areas affected by rabies.
“A decade after the start of WVS, recognising the urgent need to combat the deadly but preventable menace of rabies, Mission Rabies was born. With a focused approach, this initiative took on the daunting task of rabies elimination, one community at a time. To see it grow from a fledgling project into a global force has been nothing short of awe-inspiring.”
Luke Gamble, CEO and founder of WVS
Mission Rabies launched in India - the world's hotspot for rabies. Globally, rabies still claims the lives of approximately 59,000 people each year, with a staggering 20,000 of these fatalities occurring in India. Goa was identified as an ideal location to set the standard for rabies elimination across India. We then started to expand and established our vaccination, education, and surveillance programmes in more countries, including Malawi, Uganda, and Tanzania.
India and Malawi were two rabies endemic countries where we felt we could win significant victories in the global fight against rabies. We established permanent teams in-country, working in collaboration with local governments and valued partners. These became flagship projects that have come to demonstrate how effective rabies control can be implemented at scale and create a measurable improvement to the lives of the local community. Alongside these projects, we run programmes in many global rabies hotspots.
Crucially, our programmes are working; human rabies deaths are down in our project areas and Goa was declared a 'Rabies Controlled Area' in 2021.