Rabies and Vaccines
Denise Flaim, the pet columnist at Newsday, has an absolutely fantastic column online today about rabies and vaccinations. I think it’s must read information if you love your pets.
I get dozens of e-mail digests everyday dealing with showing dogs, breeding dogs, owning dogs, feeding dogs, grooming dogs — everything about dogs. Every few weeks someone raises the issue of vaccination protocols and there is always at least one person who pipes up very confidently stating that she doesn’t believe in vaccinating her dogs at all. She’s heard blah blah blah…and she goes on to inaccurately quote something taken out of context. Usually this person will talk about the dangers of over-vaccination, compromised immune systems, and/or allergic reactions, but she hasn’t done the research to back up her half-formed ideas. She has simply decided that she doesn’t want to vaccinate her dogs. Well, you know what? I’d rather have a dog have an allergic reaction than a dog with rabies. I’d rather have a lot of problems than a dead dog.
Do we over-vaccinate? We probably do over-vaccinate for some diseases, but that doesn’t mean you should make the unilateral choice to leave your dogs exposed to all diseases.
I even saw an e-mail from a breeder recently who said that she doesn’t believe in vaccinating her puppies against parvo. I had to shake my head. She may have been lucky so far but someday I think she will regret that decision. Yes, puppies have some immunity from their mothers when they’re born, but that immunity wears off at different rates. It’s all gone by the time pups are between 16-20 weeks old. Parvo kills. I don’t care how good your dog’s immune system is or what kind of super-premium food you feed your dogs, parvo is deadly. And people who put their faith entirely in homeopathic remedies are in for a rude awakening. I like homeopathy and use many remedies, but there are some things I don’t fool around with. Parvo and other deadly diseases fall into that category.
Dog owners need to stop thinking that vaccinations are the enemy to their dogs’ health. They should educate themselves about vaccinations and work with their vets to have a good vaccination schedule for their dogs. That may mean giving different vaccinations in different years. You may not need to re-vaccinate for every disease every year. And some people prefer to titre for diseases to see if their dogs have an adequate immune response to a particular disease. Titres are more expensive than vaccines and not reliable for all common diseases, however.
Talk to your vet about vaccinations and tell him your concerns.
Here are a couple of good vaccination protocols that are working well for many people:
University of Pennsylvania vaccination protocol
Colorado State University vaccination protocol
Denise Flaim’s article (below) is excellent and explains a great deal about rabies and vaccinations. She also writes about the increasing problem of literally thousands of dogs being imported into animal shelters in this country — dogs which may have been exposed to rabies in their own countries. It does make you wonder how people can say we have such a “pet over-population” problem here if some shelters are importing thousands of dogs, doesn’t it? I wonder how many of those dogs are put to sleep? And if their numbers are being used in the figures we’re told that are euthanized every year? At any rate, when dogs from other countries come here without rabies vaccinations they are putting other dogs at risk, including yours. Please make sure your dogs have been vaccinated. And, when you don’t vaccinate your dogs, you’re putting my dogs at risk. That’s really not acceptable.
Giving rabies vaccine is sure way to protect pets
Denise Flaim | Animal House
October 29, 2007Rabies has been eradicated.
No, wait just a second. It’s poised for an outbreak.
News reports in recent months have offered conflicting information about this deadly disease, the poster child of which is the foaming-at-the-mouth, deranged, marauding stray dog.
Last month, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the dog rabies virus had for all intents and purposes been eradicated in this country through vaccinations.
Headlines to the contrary, that didn’t mean that rabies - an essentially untreatable disease, with only one documented human survivor in this country - has disappeared for good. It means only that the strain of the disease specific to dogs is no longer active in the canine population, having been last noted here in 2004.
But while canine rabies is kaput, the disease still circulates among bats, raccoons and foxes. And because rabies is zoonotic - that is, it can be transmitted across species - humans can contract rabies from these wild critters, as can dogs and cats.
We live, said Charles Rupprecht, chief of the CDC’s rabies section, in a “sea of rabies.” The good news, he continued, is that canine rabies - which is the most common strain responsible for disease transmission between dogs themselves and which poses the greatest threat to humans, because of our close-knit relationship with the fuzzy little guys - is now no longer a threat.
Or is it?
Last week, USA Today reported that the CDC is drafting new rules for importing dogs from abroad, rules that might be in place as soon as next year. The reason? Concern that the foreign dogs might carry diseases such as rabies, which is still common in Latin America, as well as parts of Africa and Asia.
This has left the realm of the theoretical. In March, a dog from India was flown to its new owner in Alaska - flying through Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in the process - and was later pronounced rabid, according to the CDC.
The influx of Mexican-bred dogs across the Southern California border is also cause for worry. In 2004, Los Angeles noted its first case of dog rabies in three decades after a Mexican import was diagnosed with the disease. (Earlier that year, the same scenario had occurred in Massachusetts, with a dog from Puerto Rico.) The proliferation of “puppy peddlers” accounts for about 10,000 puppies brought into San Diego County annually, according to one estimate. Shelters in communities where effective spay and neuter campaigns have all but dried up the stray-puppy supply are also bringing in young dogs from abroad to meet demand.
Fear of igniting a pandemic from south of the border isn’t just limited to rabies: Eight years ago or so, multiple cases of canine hepatitis, a disease that, like rabies, is all but extinct in the U.S. dog population, cropped up in a San Diego shelter among dogs that had originated in Mexico.
Even in the absence of threats from without, Americans should continue to vaccinate dogs for rabies, reminds Jean Dodds of Santa Monica, Calif., a veterinary immunologist, vocal critic of overvaccination and co-founder of the Rabies Challenge Fund.
The purpose of the fund is to raise money for clinical trials to prove that the rabies vaccine imparts immunity for as long as five to seven years - not the three years currently acknowledged by the USDA.
But that’s a far cry from saying vaccination is no longer necessary, Dodds stresses.
“The whole point is not to stop giving the rabies vaccine, but not to give it more than it is needed” because of the risk of adverse reactions, she says. In fact, the reason canine rabies is under control in this country is precisely because of “herd immunity” - so many animals are properly vaccinated that when an infected animal is introduced, the disease cannot get a foothold.
As a result, owners whose animals are properly vaccinated can rest easy at the prospect of rogue Rovers shedding life-threatening microbes in their pooches’ vicinity. “What it should flush out is those people who decide to break the law and can’t be bothered to have their animals vaccinated,” Dodds says. “The animals at risk will be those who are not vaccinated.”
