Page 27 - LeMagWinter2015

Over Vaccination
Having been involved with pure-bred dogs for
more than 40 years, I clearly remember when Parvo
jumped species from cats to dogs. Suddenly dogs were be-
coming very ill and some died from a disease to which they
had no natural immunity.
Dog shows presented us with a huge risk for our
dogs coming into contact with others who may have been
harboring the illness. That happened to 3 of my own dogs
in the early years of parvo. My special, his son and niece all on her feet faster. However, at 6 mos of age, she developed
developed parvo. My special was very ill but all of the dogs
pulled through okay, fortunately.
Early on veterinarians were coming out to our ve-
hicles in their parking lots to give vaccines due to so many
ill dogs in the clinics. Even a few years later the vet clinic so many dogs who had those overloads of vaccines in the
was a high risk place. I had a litter of pups who went to
be cropped and a week later they were coming down with
parvo. I lost two pups, one I’d planned on keeping. For a
two week period I was running a sick pup to my non-crop
vet for support therapy and picking up another who was
over the crisis. The last pup wasn’t expected to make it but
she was very strong minded about that and she too made it
...to a ripe old age,in fact.
With those experiences, I never question my vet’s
advice to vaccinate every 6-12 months for Parvo since
I was often going to shows. In the early 1990s I ran into
something completely new as a result, something that had
no name at the time but is now called ‘vaccinosis’. It is an
extreme reaction to a vaccine. It happened with 3 pups
from different litters over a three year period. The symp-
toms were so serious that I feared the pup would never
survive. All had the same reaction, they crashed, literally,
couldn’t walk, were in pain, refused food and water (and
were nauseous). The pup first affected crashed during a
National in Maryland on the last night. I wasn’t sure he’d
make the trip home alive, but he did, sleeping most of the
way. My vet opened on a Sunday night to meet me and take
the puppy into the clinic.
The vet had not seen a puppy presenting such
symptoms previously, but treated him symptomatically and
added prednisone in the protocols. It was like a miracle
cure, but really what it did was make the puppy feel better,
not cure the problem. Time did that on its own. In about
10 days the puppy was back to his usual self, racing around
with his litter brother. His bloodwork showed
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thrombocytopenia (seriously low blood platelet count),
later the other two did as well.
When the next two pups developed similar symp-
toms, I recognized what was happening but the second
time my vet used amoxicillin rather than pred. The pup
took three weeks to improve on the antibiotics but again he
was fine in the end. I opted with the third pup to go with
pred simply because experience showed it put the pup back
HOD, which took another month to fade away.
By the mid-90s I began to ask more questions of my
and other vets and did some time at the vet school library
researching. I can’t help but think what harm was done to
80s-90s. Did the prevalence of cancer in dogs go up? Im-
mune mediated diseases seemed to be on everyone’s mind
by then. There are no answers to those questions and guilty
feelings but there is a lot more information at everyone’s
finger tips now so more informed decisions can be made.
By the turn of the century more research was fund-
ed into vaccines for both humans and pets. In our dogs, it
seems to be that we just kept the light bill paid at the clincs
around the country with those annual vaccines and maybe
adding a new wing with the serious issues that they may
have caused. Dr Jean Dodds, provided a conservative vac-
cine schedule that I began to follow, later Dr Ron Schultz’s
research showed that beyond maturity, at 2 -3 yrs, most
dogs do not need boosters at all.
Most dogs retain immunity lifelong but some due
to serious illness, age issues or other health problems may
lose levels of immunity so that it isn’t high enough to pre-
vent infection. But instead of willy-nilly vaccinating, now
we can turn to titers. Yes, we could before but the costs
were very high. Now there are 2 new titer tests that can be
done within a half-hour at your vet clinics. Only vaccines
actully needed, which are identifed by the tests, can be
done for these dogs.
However, even a conservative vaccination program
can result in a reaction. Fast forward to 2011 at Harrisburg
Regional. My newest pup crashed the last day there. The
symptoms were instantly recognizable. I called my vet as I
left to come home, again, he agreed to meet me at the clinic
on a Sunday evening. (since my old vet had retired several
years previously this was my “new” vet). I told him what I
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