Vaccination Situation #1

Here's a subject that is likely to spark controversy. I'm only going to address vaccinations in adult animals in this post. Puppies and kittens require their own review. I'm going to split this one up into two parts. It's just too much information and it's too important to skip around.

Why does this matter? What's the hubub all about? Why do we care what vaccines are done every year, what vaccines are done every three years?


The answer isn't straight-forward. To put it simply, we want to use vaccines to prevent disease, not cause disease. The current concern regarding vaccines is that vaccines in general may not be as absolutely safe as we once thought. There is the autism debate in human children, the hypothyroid debate in people and in dogs. The autoimmune debate over things like lupus being related to vaccines. We don't know for certain that vaccines cause any of these things, but it sure looks suspicious.


So if we don't know for certain if vaccines cause problems, what are we to do about it? The answer is that we should re-evaluate how we choose and use vaccines so that we are limiting our exposure to only those things that are necessary to try and prevent disease. Our goal should be to use just enough, and not too little or too much. If there isn't a compelling reason to use a vaccine - WHY DO IT? The real fight becomes when you try to identify a "compelling reason" since different people feel strongly in one direction or another.


In other words - we have to be smart about our vaccine choices. We can no longer just blindly go in to get our "shots" whenever we're told we need them. We need to treat the right patient with the right product taylored for them.

Tune in tomorrow for the next post of specific types of vaccines and specific recommendations.

AMH