Vets say shots may be deadly
Some vets believe repeated shots may be causing arthritis and cancer
By Nicholas Read
For Dalton Grady, the memory is so raw enough to hurt. You can hear it in the catch in her throat. Part of the pain is from the sadness that always comes of loss, but part of it is from blame - a nagging conviction that what happened didn’t have to.
Earlier this year, both Grady’s cats Sidney and Samantha, whom she still refers to as ‘children’, died within two months of each other, both of cancer. She believes the cause of that cancer was the routine injections she gave both cats during their lives.
She has no definitive proof, but is certain that that’s what happened. "I know so," she says in a way that brooks no disagreement, "I’m not a scientist but I know in my heart. I know intuitively".
Not so long ago, her concerts might have been laughed off by the veterinary community. But not today. While few laypeople and veterinarians dispute the role vaccines play in preventing the outbreak of serious disease, more and more of them have started to reexamine the practice of inoculating household pets repeatedly, saying that an annual vaccination may be, well, overkill.
Instead of simply protecting pets, they may be responsible for making animals sick with such auto-immune diseases as arthritis, allergies, and, like Grady’s, even cancer.
For hundreds of thousands of people in BC who live with pets, it is a potentially huge and bewildering dilemma. Until now, obeying the yearly reminder that Fluffy or Fido was due for his or her shots was part of being a responsible pet guardian. You might eschew the more loopy accouterments of the pets-as-children trend - booties for walks on wet sidewalks, sterling silver water dishes, their own seat on a plane - but shots? When the reminder came from the pet, the pet went in.
Not any more. While some veterinarians remain convinced of the efficacy, even necessity of annual shots against an array of nasty animal diseases, others think it’s time to relax the rules.
While others including a growing number of homeopathic veterinarians believe it’s time to rewrite them al together.
The new guard argues that in most instances, shots should only be given once, and that’s more than enough to maintain antibodies at the safe level.
It is yet more evidence of a burgeoning trend in pet care that shies away from a better-living-through-chemistry approach to health in favor of a more natural way.
Pet food came first. People concerned about exactly what it is that goes into those little tins - there is no government standard for pet food in this country - have switched to a less manufactured diet.
Some veterinarians as well are recommending a fresh, even raw diet, arguing that no animal, human or otherwise, can ever really be healthy eating nothing but processed food.
There are pet behaviorists who look for psychological reasons for an animal’s problems, and massage therapists that will used such previously arcane techniques such as Reiki (a form of energy healing) to soothe an animal’s aching limbs.
Acupuncture is an increasingly acceptable way of dealing with an animal’s arthritis or other joint pain.
Now some of that thinking - the same thinking that is affecting more and more human medicine- is expressing itself in concern over pet vaccines.
Nevertheless, just as in the case of so much alternative medicine, there is no clear-cut right or wrong or good or bad. It depends on whom you ask.
Even the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association can’t say. While it continues to support the use of Vaccines to control and prevent infectious diseases in animals, it no longer dictates when and how often they are necessary.,
"The CVMA. recognizes that vaccination protocols based on label recommendations are...largely unsupported by controlled scientific studies for duration of immunity or protections from disease," says a statement by the association on vaccine protocols. "As such, the protocols are only guidelines for use."
Rob Ashburner, a former president of the BC Veterinary Medical Association and currently a member of the CVMA’s executive is more blunt. He says simply: "There is no hard scientific evidence to say if (vaccines) should be given every year or three years or five years, or once in a lifetime."
In fact, he says the only reason they continue to be recommended annually is that that is how long drug manufacturers guarantee their effacy. They should last longer, Ashburner says, but no one knows, and it’s not in the interest of drug companies, who make billions manufacturing pet vaccines to find out.
Nor might it be in the interest of veterinarians who can earn up to 25% of their incomes administering vaccines, says Michael Goldberg, a homeopathic vet who looked after Grady’s cats when they became seriously ill.
"If 25% of my business were vaccinations," he says, "I would be potentially reluctant to decrease that and only vaccinate every few years."
According to Ashburner, what stirred the debate was the discovery of a number of years ago, that in some cases, vaccinations did cause tumors in cats. Called ‘vaccine-associated-sarcomas’, they are an aggressive form of cancer that appear at the site where the vaccine was injected.
And though their incidence is rare - estimates range from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 10,000 animals - Ashburner argues that the fact that they exist at all is cause for concern.
As a result, even such conservative organizations as the American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA), an umbrella organization for more than 29,000 veterinarians in the US, as amended its vaccinate guidelines to say that inoculations against most core diseases - among them distemper, parvovirus and rabies in dog, and panleukopenia (distemper), feline leukemia and rabies in cats - should be administered only every three years.
But is a three year interval prudent enough?
According to a landmark 1992 study by La Jolla, CA veterinarian Tom Phillips and Madison, Wis. veterinarian Ronald Schultz, the practice of giving annual vaccines lacks any scientific validity whatsoever.
"Almost without exception, there is no immunologic requirement for animal revaccination," they said in their study, entitled Canine and Feline Vaccines. "Immunity to virus persists for years or for the life of the animal. Successful vaccination to most bacterial pathogens produces an immunologic memory that remains for year, allowing an animal to develop a protective response when exposed to virulent organisms.
That is Goldberg’s position as well. After 10 years in practice, first as a strictly allopathic (conventional) vet, Goldberg now believes that vaccinations in pets should be kept to a minimum, and in some cases, may do far more harm than good.
However, like Grady, Goldberg admits there is little or no scientific evidence to suggest a direct causality between the over-prescribing of vaccines and such ailments as skin allergies, digestive disorder, cancer, and other auto-immune diseases.
But, he adds, that’s only because no one has done any research on it "And I certainly can’t blame the drug companies for not wanting to."
What there is, Goldberg says, is plenty of anecdotal evidence, at least within the homeopathic community, that such a link does exist. "From one’s experience in the medial field, you can put one and one together and realize that when we do see ill animals, those illnesses often occur right after a vaccination."
As a result, he now recommends that his patients be vaccinated only when there are puppies or kittens and no more.
"In my experience, I do not believe that the vaccines turn off in a year," he says in a statement that he hands out to all his new patients. "Most of the contagious diseases I have seen in clinical situations have been in young dogs and cats who have been unvaccinated or poorly vaccinated as well as malnourished.
"I believe that before we continue to inject foreign substances year after year into our pets, which I believe can cause them harm, that we should first make sure they absolutely need it. If they don’t, why do it?"
Instead, he advises doing blood tests to determine the animal’s immunity to disease, and if that immunity is still high, no vaccination is necessary.
Dr. Jean Dodd, a veterinary hematologist and immunologist in Greater Los Angeles, and one of the pioneers in the vaccine debate, says annual vaccines began to be prescribed in the 1950s shortly after they were developed.
Back then, she says, drug companies got together with the US Department of Agriculture and decided - without any scientific tests to support their positions - that vaccines should be administered once a year.
"When the public finds this out now, we’re horrified" she says. "That this was never based on any scientific fact."
But she adds that they probably "did it in good faith" given that vaccines were new then and probably not as good as they are now.
However, as time wore on, she says anecdotal evidence of the harm repeated vaccinations can do began to accumulate.
She noticed that in her own practice that animals that received annual boosters would come down with auto-immune diseases days or weeks after the injection of the vaccine.
Slowly she began to put the pieces together and decided "this is happening too often."
Since then, Dodds has been on a crusade to get other doctors to listen, and by and large they are, she says.
"It’s the road less traveled," Dodds says. "Scandal is necessary for moral advancement."
For Dr. Stanley Coren, a UBC psychologist with a particular interest in dogs, the controversy remains just that. He remains unconvinced.
But he is not surprised that a matter such as pet vaccines could be of such profound concern to so many people.
"Even if you’re relatively rational and scientifically trained, you really do get the feeling you’re talking to a family member when you talk to a dog," he says. "It’s not the brightest bulb in the family, but it is a family member, and that’s important.
"Also, because they are perpetual infants, they elicit in us a sense of protectiveness. It’s almost a parental kind of a feeling where if anything happens to the animal in the same way that if anything happened to a two year old, you’re feel personally responsible. So when we get a situation like now where you think of matters of health and nutrition being in flux, individuals think ‘I have been considering alternative medicine or some new fitness program, and here’s my baby, so maybe I should consider something for them.’"
For Julie-Anne Lee, a homeopath who works out of the Adored Beast Veterinary Clinic on West Broadway, proof of that is in her client list. After starting out with only four customers, she now has more than 4000.
"We are seeing more and more people becoming aware of the vaccine issue and coming and asking us about them," Lee says.
"It’s great that people are taking more control and responsibility for they’re animal’ health.
For Ashburner and others, it’s less cut and dried, and will be until conclusive research is finally available.
As such, his advice on vaccine is that people be smart and do what feels right.
"It’s like with any service. You have to go somewhere where you’re comfortable and that there’s some trust in the relationship."
GOING TO THE DOGS
The Canadian pet industry is worth about $2 billion per year
Average yearly expenditure on pet food per household in Canada-$304
On purchase of pets-$223
On pet-related goods-$111
On veterinarian care-$332
On average yearly expenditure on pet food per household in BC-$351
On purchase of pets-$229
On pet-related goods-$107
On veterinarian care-$364
Source: Statistics Canada