JoyBee&Ravan
Member Since 2018
Once your animal is vaccinated ,should you re-vaccinate every year? Or ever again?
6/27 How often should you vaccinate your animal?
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Noah & me (GA)
Member Since 2016
Marco goes out on the front lawn and once a year escapes overnight. He gets a rabies shot and a booster when and if needed. The other four never get out but get whatever our vet recommends, she often takes their age into consideration and never oversells us.
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JoyBee&Ravan
Member Since 2018
@Noah & me (GA)
Did You watch the video about Vaccinations?
Did You watch the video about Vaccinations?
Noah & me (GA)
Member Since 2016
Yes I did. I've never had a cat or dog vaccinated as many times in such a short period of time as the video suggests. It's a scary world out there but there's no zombie apocalypse. My vet uses common sense.
Larry and Kitties
Member Since 2009
I vaccinate mine for Rabies and FVRCP (rhinotracheitis, calicivirus and panleukopenia). For Rabies ther is one shot and then second shot one year later. After every three years. My cats get the Merial PureVax rabies vaccine since it does not contain an adjuvant that may cause VAS. For the FVRCP the initial series is three shot about 2-4 weeks apart or so and then the next one after a year and then every three years. In most localities in the USA a cat is required to vaccinated/revaccinated for rabies in accordance the vaccine manufacturer's instructions. I get the FVRCP vaccine since new cats frequently arrive.
JoyBee&Ravan
Member Since 2018
I believe the video stated the vet can do a titer & if it shows even a trace of the vaccine it means the animal is covered for rabies.
Bron and Sheba (GA)
Member Since 2015
I live in Australia and I have indoor cats. I get mine done every three or so years. We don’t have rabies here do don’t have to vaccinate.
Larry and Kitties
Member Since 2009
I do not know of any states that allow a rabies titer to substitute for an actual rabies vaccination periodicity. For virginia:
http://www.rabiesaware.org/?state=va&page=faq
9. CAN A RABIES ANTIBODY TITER BE USED TO ESTABLISH "IMMUNITY"?
No. Rabies antibody titers are indicative of an animal’s response to vaccine or infection. Titers do not directly correlate with protection because other immunologic factors also play a role in preventing rabies, and our abilities to measure and interpret those other factors are not well developed. Therefore, evidence of circulating rabies virus antibodies should not be used as a substitute for current vaccination in managing rabies exposures or determining the need for booster vaccinations in animals.
JoyBee&Ravan
Member Since 2018
I was going by what Dr. Karen Becker said in her video. She is a well know & respected Veterinary Physician. So you're saying she's "wrong" ?
Noah & me (GA)
Member Since 2016
I've been silent and respectful about this for almost a week trying to learn more about Dr. Becker and her business partner Dr.Joseph Mercola.
First, this is the text of the video. It comes from the Closed Caption option on YouTube and is full of grammatical and punctual errors. Anything in italics is mine.
Did you know that most dogs and cats receive well over a dozen vaccines before they reach adulthood?
Most puppies receive their first vaccinations between five and seven weeks of age then every two to three weeks until they are 16 weeks old. These are combination vaccines which can contain up to five different attenuated viruses and one syringe given three times before the puppy is 16 weeks of age. That's 15 vaccines before 4 months of age then puppies are given rabies vaccine plus kennel cough, Lepto and Lyme vaccines and, depending on risk, the influenza vaccine. That's over eighteen vaccines in a span of three months
Kittens on the other hand received 14 to 19 vaccines the first vaccination when a kitty is 6 or 7 weeks old. They receive another nine or 10 vaccines and at 16 to 19 weeks of age they may receive another 4 to 5 shots depending on their environmental risk. You may be asking yourself are all these vaccines even necessary and if so are there any risks?
Dr. Ronald Schultz an expert on companion animal vaccines said that there is little to no scientific studies that show the need for revaccination in a dog or cat in their lifetime. No well-timed shot for your pet can be enough to protect him for his life but while the pressure from veterinarians to revaccination actually came from in the 1970s vaccines sold in the market were licensed by the US Department of Agriculture. These vaccines were made based on studies that lasted from only a few weeks to a few months. No one actually studied how long the vaccines would last and vaccine makers didn't bother assessing duration of immunity because these tests were expensive and would take years to complete so it was arbitrarily decided that annual revaccination would be the standard in veterinary medicine. This decision was not rooted in science, it was rooted in a guess which quickly became a mainstay of generating at least one guaranteed annual vet visit for the veterinarian hidden under the mask of the annual wellness exam.
In 1978 Doctor Shultz and his colleagues released a study that recommended puppies and kittens be vaccinated every three years instead of every year but this recommendation wasn't fully recognized until 2003 when a task force assembled by the American Animal Hospital Association gauged their findings. Although the American Animal Hospital Association noted that some vaccines protected pets for at least seven years they needed to strike a compromise with practicing veterinarians who were very fearful that they would lose clients if vaccine protocols were reduced. The American Animal Hospital Association's final recommendations were that owners should have their pets be vaccinated every three years. Sadly this three-year recommendation is still not rooted in science and even more frustrating it still not followed by many veterinarians today. By 2020 the veterinary vaccine market is expected to expand to seven million dollars and as manufacturers release new vaccines in the market we can assume that there will be more pressure to vaccinate not less from the medical community but revaccination can lead to over vaccinations exposing your pets to harmful substances and increasing his risk for deadly diseases such as cancer, autoimmune diseases and life-threatening vaccine reactions. Currently one in two dogs and one and three cats in the U.S. die from cancer, a statistic that didn't exist 40 years ago so why do people over vaccinate their pets?
There are three possible reasons. One is lack of awareness due to the influence of advertisements, vaccine laws and outdated vet recommendations. Second, many kennels and pet boarding facilities do not accept titer pets and finally many pet owners have little to no knowledge about healthier alternatives such as titer testing.
(A titer test is a laboratory blood test. It checks for the presence of certain antibodies in the blood stream. Testing involves drawing blood from a patient and check it in a lab for presence of bacteria or disease. It is often used to see if someone is immune to a certain virus or needs vaccination.)
Take Jake for instance. He brings his dog Fido to the vet for a vaccination instead of a wellness and titer checkup. This has become the norm for pet owners since they erroneously believe that the more vaccine a pet gets the healthier the pet will be but vaccinations aren't like gas where over time your pets immunity runs low and then eventually runs out where they're unprotected. Your pet doesn't magically run out of their vaccinations on a one or three-year basis and the exciting news you can actually check your pets immune response to vaccines with a simple blood draw called a titer test. If your pet has any titer no matter how low the titer is they are considered actively immunized.
This is excellent news for people who are looking to know that their pets are protected without giving unnecessary additional vaccines.
I don't call this holistic medicine, I call this common-sense medicine and something all veterinarians should be doing. What Jake didn't know was that he can offer common-sense medicine to fight on by partnering with an integrative veterinarian then vet visits can truly become wellness visits wellness medicine focuses on preventing disease beforehand instead of treating it when it strikes.
Most conventional vets are not taught this type of medicine in school instead they learn reactive medicine or identifying and treating degenerative disease and illness once they have occurred.
This is why proactive veterinary medicine is a foreign concept among many vets and in turn most pet owners in this one vaccine example alone pet owners and veterinarians could work together and spark a change in the way that pets are protected from illnesses eliminating unnecessary immune compromising vaccines is just one of the many ways proactive veterinarians work to identify lifestyle obstacles before disease occurs.
If you don't know any wellness veterinarians check out the American holistic Veterinary Medical Association's "Find a holistic veterinarian page". You can also visit our website healthy pets Mercola.com for tips on how to take care of your pet as well they deserve nothing less than the very best.
You can be the judge on this. A Google search "is dr karen becker a quack" yields 88,100 results. People thought Galileo Galilei was a quack too but he never put my cat's health at risk. Karen Becker has an affiliation with Dr. Joseph Mercola who is a quack.
He advocates vitamin D rather than a flu shot.
His site promotes a number of alternative health ideas, including the notion that homeopathy can treat autism.
He claims that microwaving food alters its chemistry.
He opposes homogenized milk.
He makes a lot of money doing this, a lot!
I believe Dr. Becker is using scare tactics in her video. The numbers she quotes are the maximum number of shots possible for a cat receiving a vaccine and follow up booster for every possible illness. Then she posts an open ended question "Currently one in two dogs and one and three cats in the U.S. die from cancer, a statistic that didn't exist 40 years ago so why do people over vaccinate their pets?" She never attempts to make any connection between vaccinations and cancer. She has some valid points but telling me one vaccine shot is good for life is not good science. Having a lot of followers and your own YouTube channel does not make you right.
For the record I see a chiropractor and believe in many natural cures, I was also immunized for measles. She is right about common sense medicine, it's a shame she does not practice what she preaches.
The site Quackwatch, read all about Dr. Mercola and the various warnings he has received from the FDA.
https://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/mercola.html
First, this is the text of the video. It comes from the Closed Caption option on YouTube and is full of grammatical and punctual errors. Anything in italics is mine.
Did you know that most dogs and cats receive well over a dozen vaccines before they reach adulthood?
Most puppies receive their first vaccinations between five and seven weeks of age then every two to three weeks until they are 16 weeks old. These are combination vaccines which can contain up to five different attenuated viruses and one syringe given three times before the puppy is 16 weeks of age. That's 15 vaccines before 4 months of age then puppies are given rabies vaccine plus kennel cough, Lepto and Lyme vaccines and, depending on risk, the influenza vaccine. That's over eighteen vaccines in a span of three months
Kittens on the other hand received 14 to 19 vaccines the first vaccination when a kitty is 6 or 7 weeks old. They receive another nine or 10 vaccines and at 16 to 19 weeks of age they may receive another 4 to 5 shots depending on their environmental risk. You may be asking yourself are all these vaccines even necessary and if so are there any risks?
Dr. Ronald Schultz an expert on companion animal vaccines said that there is little to no scientific studies that show the need for revaccination in a dog or cat in their lifetime. No well-timed shot for your pet can be enough to protect him for his life but while the pressure from veterinarians to revaccination actually came from in the 1970s vaccines sold in the market were licensed by the US Department of Agriculture. These vaccines were made based on studies that lasted from only a few weeks to a few months. No one actually studied how long the vaccines would last and vaccine makers didn't bother assessing duration of immunity because these tests were expensive and would take years to complete so it was arbitrarily decided that annual revaccination would be the standard in veterinary medicine. This decision was not rooted in science, it was rooted in a guess which quickly became a mainstay of generating at least one guaranteed annual vet visit for the veterinarian hidden under the mask of the annual wellness exam.
In 1978 Doctor Shultz and his colleagues released a study that recommended puppies and kittens be vaccinated every three years instead of every year but this recommendation wasn't fully recognized until 2003 when a task force assembled by the American Animal Hospital Association gauged their findings. Although the American Animal Hospital Association noted that some vaccines protected pets for at least seven years they needed to strike a compromise with practicing veterinarians who were very fearful that they would lose clients if vaccine protocols were reduced. The American Animal Hospital Association's final recommendations were that owners should have their pets be vaccinated every three years. Sadly this three-year recommendation is still not rooted in science and even more frustrating it still not followed by many veterinarians today. By 2020 the veterinary vaccine market is expected to expand to seven million dollars and as manufacturers release new vaccines in the market we can assume that there will be more pressure to vaccinate not less from the medical community but revaccination can lead to over vaccinations exposing your pets to harmful substances and increasing his risk for deadly diseases such as cancer, autoimmune diseases and life-threatening vaccine reactions. Currently one in two dogs and one and three cats in the U.S. die from cancer, a statistic that didn't exist 40 years ago so why do people over vaccinate their pets?
There are three possible reasons. One is lack of awareness due to the influence of advertisements, vaccine laws and outdated vet recommendations. Second, many kennels and pet boarding facilities do not accept titer pets and finally many pet owners have little to no knowledge about healthier alternatives such as titer testing.
(A titer test is a laboratory blood test. It checks for the presence of certain antibodies in the blood stream. Testing involves drawing blood from a patient and check it in a lab for presence of bacteria or disease. It is often used to see if someone is immune to a certain virus or needs vaccination.)
Take Jake for instance. He brings his dog Fido to the vet for a vaccination instead of a wellness and titer checkup. This has become the norm for pet owners since they erroneously believe that the more vaccine a pet gets the healthier the pet will be but vaccinations aren't like gas where over time your pets immunity runs low and then eventually runs out where they're unprotected. Your pet doesn't magically run out of their vaccinations on a one or three-year basis and the exciting news you can actually check your pets immune response to vaccines with a simple blood draw called a titer test. If your pet has any titer no matter how low the titer is they are considered actively immunized.
This is excellent news for people who are looking to know that their pets are protected without giving unnecessary additional vaccines.
I don't call this holistic medicine, I call this common-sense medicine and something all veterinarians should be doing. What Jake didn't know was that he can offer common-sense medicine to fight on by partnering with an integrative veterinarian then vet visits can truly become wellness visits wellness medicine focuses on preventing disease beforehand instead of treating it when it strikes.
Most conventional vets are not taught this type of medicine in school instead they learn reactive medicine or identifying and treating degenerative disease and illness once they have occurred.
This is why proactive veterinary medicine is a foreign concept among many vets and in turn most pet owners in this one vaccine example alone pet owners and veterinarians could work together and spark a change in the way that pets are protected from illnesses eliminating unnecessary immune compromising vaccines is just one of the many ways proactive veterinarians work to identify lifestyle obstacles before disease occurs.
If you don't know any wellness veterinarians check out the American holistic Veterinary Medical Association's "Find a holistic veterinarian page". You can also visit our website healthy pets Mercola.com for tips on how to take care of your pet as well they deserve nothing less than the very best.
You can be the judge on this. A Google search "is dr karen becker a quack" yields 88,100 results. People thought Galileo Galilei was a quack too but he never put my cat's health at risk. Karen Becker has an affiliation with Dr. Joseph Mercola who is a quack.
He advocates vitamin D rather than a flu shot.
His site promotes a number of alternative health ideas, including the notion that homeopathy can treat autism.
He claims that microwaving food alters its chemistry.
He opposes homogenized milk.
He makes a lot of money doing this, a lot!
I believe Dr. Becker is using scare tactics in her video. The numbers she quotes are the maximum number of shots possible for a cat receiving a vaccine and follow up booster for every possible illness. Then she posts an open ended question "Currently one in two dogs and one and three cats in the U.S. die from cancer, a statistic that didn't exist 40 years ago so why do people over vaccinate their pets?" She never attempts to make any connection between vaccinations and cancer. She has some valid points but telling me one vaccine shot is good for life is not good science. Having a lot of followers and your own YouTube channel does not make you right.
For the record I see a chiropractor and believe in many natural cures, I was also immunized for measles. She is right about common sense medicine, it's a shame she does not practice what she preaches.
The site Quackwatch, read all about Dr. Mercola and the various warnings he has received from the FDA.
https://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/mercola.html
Jill & Alex (GA)
Member Since 2009
To learn more on the subject of vaccinations, one might want to take a look at the information provided in this sticky note: "To vaccinate or not: That is the question" from the Health Links / FAQs about Feline Diabetes Forum.
There is also an interesting and informative discussion in the Think Tank Forum titled, "What do you think about vaccinations every year?". I've unlocked the thread in case anyone would like to add to or continue this discussion. Think Tank is a much better place for discourse of this kind.
Thank you!
There is also an interesting and informative discussion in the Think Tank Forum titled, "What do you think about vaccinations every year?". I've unlocked the thread in case anyone would like to add to or continue this discussion. Think Tank is a much better place for discourse of this kind.
Thank you!
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