Ethical Considerations for Vets (and patients)

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I have been thinking a lot about vaccines again the past few days. It just seems to keep coming up. And here is what I really don’t get, there is a lot of information out there telling us that giving the core vaccines (Rabies, Parvo, Distemper, and Adenovirus) annually is just plain UNECESSARY, and yet I’ve met very few vets who convey that to their patients.

And we are not talking andecdotal evidence where someone said “well, I had this dog vaccinated once and then took him everywhere with me and he met lots of dogs and never get sick.” No, this is evidence where a lot of really respected non-fringy vets at the university level are conducting studies that have to meet certain standards in order to be considered valid. And they’ve run them multiple times and still get the same results. So why do I still get a postcard every year reminding me it’s time for those shots?

I think there are two factors at work here. The first is that many pet owners have been told for many years by many people that they need to give the core vaccines yearly in order for their pets to be protected. And the truth is that unless their pet has an adverse reaction that clearly correlates to a vaccine or unless they stumble across some information that indicates otherwise, the vast majority of pet owners will never question giving yearly vaccines. If their vet were to say to them, “I have these two different vaccines, one you have to give every three years and one you have to give every year,” most owners will probably still opt for the yearly because it’s what they’ve always known.

For these people, I get frustrated that vets don’t do more education. For example, my vet, who is a wonderful lady that I truly enjoy taking my pets to, and I have had several conversations on vaccination frequency. She agrees with me. She reads the studies too and can’t wait for the day when more people become more enlightened and stop vaccinating so frequently. She does not continue to revaccinate her personal pets. She still offers yearly vaccines. Why? The funny part is when I took Lyla in to get her final Parvo/Distemper shot at 1 year old, she asked if I wanted the one year or three year shot, and then laughed and said, “actually, to be perfectly honest, they are exactly the same, just have different numbers on the bottle.”

Another friend of mine had been taking her animals to the same vet for a while and giving them yearly shots. After talking with me she asked her vet about vaccinating less frequently. He launched into all the studies on duration of immunity being much  longer than we thought it was, and yes, it’s perfectly safe for her to vaccinate less frequently. Why are they not sharing this information unless it’s asked for?!

I think the second reason some vets continue to not only offer but encourage yearly core vaccinations is because they are pretty old school themselves and think it is necessary. I can’t imagine being in a profession and not keeping up with the current research, but I know it happens. I had a vet tell me it was perfectly safe to give an Aussie Ivermec daily as a treatment for mange. When I questioned him he told me it was only Collies and Shelties that had to worry. I never went back to that vet again, but it just shows you what kind of stupid erroneous information can be transferred if the medical profession isn’t staying current, and it worries me.

And just as an aside, the American Animal Hospital Association is now recommending vaccinating for the core disease every three years rather than yearly, and the AAHA doesn’t change their recommendations on flimsy evidence.

(Now, I still don’t agree with every three years being necessary either, and the studies back me up there too, but I still think it’s a heck of a lot better than every year. )

Here is a direct quote pulled from a Schultz seminar: ” Recent vaccine trials have shown long-term immunity of more than seven years for distemper and parvovirus, more than three years with a canary pox-vectored distemper vaccine, and more than seven years for canine adenovirus with the second-generation vaccine product. Where studies demonstrate three years of immunity, the next steps will be to test for five, then seven.” (Note: the vaccine referenced as a 3 year DOI is the newest Recombitek vaccine and has not been on the market long enough to prove longer than 3 years. Testing for a longer DOI is still in progress and I will be very suprised if it comes back any shorter than the MLV vaccines).

I am including a link to Schultz’s paper/lecture here so you can read it for yourself. Don’t trust me, but do your own research. Read good, solid, scientifically backed up information (if you don’t have the desire to read the studies themselves, which most people don’t) and then go talk to your vet about it. Make a decision together, but make sure you are educated before trusting your vet blindly. I’ve found that more often than not vets will either do what they think their patients want without asking or they will not be as up to date themselves as they should be.

And just an FYI, if you choose to not vaccinate every year, it still doesn’t get you off the hook for going in for your yearly examination. I think this is another reason some vets continue yearly vaccines, it gets pets in to be seen. My dogs (and cat) go in every year for an exam regardless because my vet will catch things I don’t.

http://www.americanwaterspanielclub.org/pdf/Health%20and%20Genetics/What_Everyone_Canine_Vaccines.pdf

I’ve also noticed people seem to be extremely quiet on here. I’d like to hear some feedback. Leave a comment and tell me I’m crazy. Tell me you want to know where I’m getting this information from because you’ve never heard it. Tell me talked to your vet and it went great (or not so great). Tell me how your day is going… just talk to me! =)

 

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What the Pharmaceutical Companies Don’t Want You To Read

There are two “hot button” dog issues that really get me going: food and vaccines. Why the vast majority of dog owners aren’t concerned with these issues given the massive implications they can have on the health and lifespan of your dog, and subsequently the vet bills you pay, I don’t know. Perhaps many just don’t realize or have never had cause to believe they might be being misled.

I am certainly no expert, don’t get me wrong, but I am a researcher by profession and by nature, and I tend to research things to death. I read very long, very dry journal articles and books for my own personal… “enjoyment” is too strong a word… “enrichment.”

Today I’ve found a new study out this year by Dr Shultz who is kind of my vaccine hero. His findings indicate what people have been saying/thinking for a really long time, and that is that dogs and cats that have been vaccinated for the core viral diseases (in dogs this is Distemper and Parvo, and Rabies too… but that’s a different beast thanks to legislation) after about 4 months of age, have a Duration of Immunity that lasts at least, AT LEAST, not at most, at least 9-10 years. Futhermore, Shultz goes on to say that elderly dogs and cats, unless they have never been vaccinated ever or were vaccinated at too young an age where the vaccine was nuetralized by maternal antibodies still present, do not become ill with or die from Parvo or Distemper.

So basically, I see this article as having two very real, very pertinent implications to breeders and pet owners alike. The first is that starting to vaccinate puppies at 4 weeks or 6 weeks or whatever your vet recommends that is really young, is kind of a waste of money and puts immature pups at a needless risk of vaccinosis. The maternal antibodies that are passed to the pups through the dam’s milk are killing that vaccine in the system, not mounting up an immunological memory of it. Shultz alludes that at or around 16 weeks is when the maternal antibodies are no longer doing their job, so to speak, and vaccination should occur.

The other thing Shultz’s research implies it that continuing to vaccinate throughout the lifespan is useless. And I want you to really think about this for a minute. You were probably vaccinated for measles as a child. Do you go in to the doctor every year to get your “measles booster.” Absolutely not. Do you go in every 3 years to get a “measles booster.” No. Why? Because your body has built up an immunity to the measles virus and continuing to be vaccinated does not make you more immune. You either have an immunity or you don’t.

Now you might argue that some vaccines you do have to get semi-regularly, such as tetanus. That is because tetanus is a bacteria and vaccines for bacteria or parasites are much more iffy and tend to not provide the same kind of results we can expect from viral vaccines. That is another beast and one I’m not going to go into here.

This is not the first vaccine study Shultz has done either. He has been consistently showing through scientific, reproducible studies that the Duration of Immunity for the core viral illnesses is really, really long, and probably the life of your pet.

All of this, on top of the knowledge that vaccines can do some really scary stuff to your animal that range from mildly concerning (fever, diarrhea, lethargy) to super scary (seizures, cancers at injection site). I don’t think that vaccine reactions are as rare as we might like to think they are either. I have two right in my own house.

My sweet little rescue cat, Izzy, came to me perfectly healthy. I fed her one of the better brands of cat food and gave her the yearly booster shots the vet told me she needed. I was a model pet owner. One year I took her to the vet to get her yearly vaccinations and everything was uneventful. Three to four weeks later my kitty was very, very ill. It took a whole lot of testing and two opinions to pin down she had Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Developed it out of the blue, just like that. Since it was several weeks removed from the vaccines she’d been given, I never put the two together until many, many months later when I began researching vaccines and learned IBD can, in fact, be triggered by vaccine reactions. Not only that, but vaccine reactions commonly happen several weeks or even a month or two after the physical shot is given, so most reactions are not reported or even attributed to vaccinosis. I can’t prove it was the vaccines that did it, but I would be surprised if it were anything else. Unfortunately, Izzy has to live the rest of her life with this disease because of my ignorance and the industry’s lack of scruples.

Sky’s story is a little less dramatic, but frightening all the same. Sky came to me at 9 weeks having already have 2 rounds of “puppy shots,” and at the advice of our vet he received 3 more by the time he was 16 weeks old (plus the Rabies at 16 weeks). Some puppies might be able to withstand that kind of assault on the system, but Sky obviously could not. Over the next 6 months he got every kind of bacterial infection you could think of. I didn’t even stop to think that maybe his immune system wasn’t working properly. On top of that, the vet prescribed antibiotics every single time. By the time Sky was a year old, whatever precious little immune system he had was gone. Since I still didn’t know the things I know now, he got his “boosters” at a year old and our battle with Demodex Mange began.

Sky is now almost 2 and a half years old and I have finally started to get him to a point I feel is healthy. He is on a 100% raw diet and it is doing wonders for him. The way I know this is actually kind of sad. You see, Sky never actually grew a top coat. He still has “puppy fur” (undercoat) everywhere but down the line of his back. If you look closely at some of the pictures I have posted of him, you can see how his back looks different than his sides. That’s because his back is the only place he has ever grown that long, coarse, water resistant hair that is supposed to cover his whole body. Since starting him on the raw diet he has started sprouting long hairs all over his sides. He looks like a porcupine if you view him from the side. That tells me his body is finally, after more than two years, healthy enough to start putting energy into producing a good coat. Sky’s actually due this month for his Rabies and I’m putting it off and dreading it like the plague because his poor body is still so fragile and every stressor seems to send us right back into mange.

So why do we continue to vaccinate like crazy people? I have a theory, but it sounds all conspiratorial, so I won’t go into it, but let’s just say a lot of people are making a lot of money.

If you are interested in reading the very dry but very interesting article, you can go here for the abstract (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19959181), and if you’re lucky enough to be connected to a university system like I am, you might be able to click the button to read the full text article.

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