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During my medical training at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, my resident was a doctor from the Philippines - Dr. Lia Guina. She told me about San Lazaro Hospital in Manila, which specialized in infections and served patients who were from poor areas, and invited me to work in the Philippines for a month.

When I arrived at SLH I was amazed to see long lines of people in the Emergency Room waiting to be seen. Most of the patients were dog bite victims; children accompanied by worried parents, as a dog bite in the Philippines can cause rabies.

While I was there, I actually saw children who had developed rabies. The young girl in this photo doesn’t look very ill, but she was bitten by a dog six weeks earlier, and her parents didn’t know to get her treated, only bringing her to hospital when symptoms began to show.

She died two days after this photo was taken. I couldn’t believe my eyes - rabies in humans is extremely rare in the US.

I felt so sorry for the patients I saw with rabies, and their families, because it was too late to save them. If they'd been vaccinated straight away, these people would have survived. I thought it terrible that in the 21st century, a disease like rabies still existed, and realized if people only knew about this tragedy, we could make a difference. That’s how RFW got started…