I’m not sure what you are saying here. If the baby starts out with a bad immune system, then a bunch of vaccinations right off the bat might not be a good idea. If the baby starts out with a normal immune system, has there been any research to indicate of a bunch of vaccinations right off the bat do or don’t have an adverse affect on the immune system? I’m not interested in any vaccines the baby has not been getting.
Which would be another question of mine that went unanswered in the rush to stomp out my “antivax attitude”. When I read the CDC recommendations for vaccinating children, the same ones are repeated, which makes it look like they are getting boosters.
No, but they do get more vaccines against more diseases and the total number of shots they get in their first six years is more than most pets are going to get in a lifetime. Plus, unless I am reading the CDC chart wrong again, it appears that it is recommended that kids get boosted for some diseases fairly frequently - influenza every year, DTap every two to four years, MCV every four (?) years. Plus there was a post saying that they had to be boosted again to get into college, or some colleges.
?? What specifically are animals supposed to be vaccinated for every year? I haven’t heard of this, not recently anyway since the vaccine protocols changed.
This isn’t anything new - other than finding specific genes. I myself inherited my allergies and asthma over 51 years ago. Epipen doesn’t really have much to do with it, most allergics don’t have it that bad - unless that has changed too? Is there a higher percentage of people with allergies that require that sort of emergency medicine now than 30 or so years ago? (If so, it makes me wonder again why buyers expect my pups’ parents to have genetic tests done, but any old human can breed…)
Assuming I understood the cite, it appears that they have ruled out vaccines as causing certain diseases, except possibly where there was a genetic likelyhood the person would have expressed the disease at some point in their life anyway. Unfortunately for me, I was specifically interested in asthma and food allergies, since these are the two that seemed to me had become far more common, particularly in families where these issues had not been previously known.
OTOH, as I was reading thru your cite, it occurred to me that most parents these days probably don’t know all that much about the “pedigrees” of their children due to how mobile our population is now. Also, there are no national registries for disease clearance in humans as there is for dogs, and to some extent cats. So, it may be that the rise in autoimmune issues is due to the fact that humans are not “vetted” before breeding, and modern medicine is keeping more people alive to “breeding age”. In dogs, we would say that is breeding oneself into a corner! :eek:
As an anecdotal aside, my 4-year-old daughter has had growing sores on her face for the last few days, so we took her to the doctor today and she was diagnosed with–wait for it–chicken pox! Goddammit. (And yes she is current on her vaccinations.) Okay, chicken pox isn’t that bad, but it’s also unnecessary. Hope it doesn’t scar.
As far as food allergies and animals go, just the opposite. This is being explored in people, too.
Again, see DSeid’s earlier post for a discussion.
Regards,
Shodan
Eh, I don’t think even in pedigreed dogs is breeding that selective. I mean, it is certainly selective, but I’ve seen many people let the animals breed without careful consideration of genealogy and diseases and lineage and all that. More like “Hey, I bought two Boston Terriers that are not littermates! Let them have puppies!”. 
In regards to your other questions…
You keep talking about dogs because admittedly that’s all you have experience with. I keep telling you that animals routinely get vaccinated with many diseases every single year sometimes even more. And this has to do because the vaccines are not as effective (longer lasting) as they have shown to be in dogs and cats. Are they trying to solve this? Maybe, maybe not.
Off the top of my head, as I have said before, the vaccine component for lepto (leptospirosis) is not as effective as the rest of the combo (DHLPP) for dogs. Not only that, but there is more than one strain (at least 6). Over the years, the strains/serovars that affect dogs have changed.
In pigs, they’re routinely vaccinated for diseases that can cause failure to thrive or reproductive failure (or can be zoonotic). Examples are Brucella and Lepto (yea, it can affect pigs).
Horses get vaccinated up to four times a year against viral encephalitides (WNV, EEE, WEE). Those vaccines SUCK at being long lasting, hence they have to be given that many times. Those diseases, particularly EEE, are very fatal. They also get regular tetanus shots.
I think cattle and sheep get clostridium vaccines (those 7 in one or 8 in one that I mentioned earlier) that have to be given every year.
I meant in another post that for the most part, an immune system that was developed in a fairly clean environment is hit right off the bat (during birth) with a bunch of antigens and for the most part they can handle those insults. Therefore handling the relatively lesser antigens present in vaccines (compared with what they get hit on a daily basis, since birth) is not hard for their systems to handle appropiately.
If their immune system is bad from the get-go, you cannot blame vaccines for that.
Influenza vaccine is repeated every year because every year the strain is different. It is not necessarily the same antigen given again and again.
Consider that there are more diseases affecting humans that have been as well described in animals. Also, that we have created better vaccines for them than many animal diseases. Thirdly, you mentioned vaccines that were given more frequently before (corona) and are not so common now. This is true, yet that doesn’t mean that all vaccine development has been stopped in the animal side. Vaccines are still being researched. Newer, better, longer lasting, for other diseases or conditions (melanoma in dogs) or for other regional diseases (Leishmania).
Some vaccines are given as part of a series of doses, not as one initial dose and boosters. My son is currently going through the Hep B series. He got one at his last checkup, he’ll get the next at his next checkup, and I forget when he’s due for his last dose. But they’re not boosters.
Yes, he’s current on his shots, including varicella. And, no, he doesn’t have any sort of developmental disorder.
Robin
Why would anyone think that someone who has problems from a vaccine wouldn’t have problems if they got the actual disease the vaccine helps prevent?
If someone’s going to react badly to a measles vaccine . . . why would getting the measles (which will happen if we stop vaccinating) be any better or safer?
You’re right, allergies are on the rise. However, a lot has changed in the last fifty years, and increased vaccinations are only a small part of a child’s changing environment milieu.
Here (again) is the NYT article that addresses this question.
It concludes that it is our over-hygienic environment which fails to prime our immune system properly.
To quote (seeing as you apparently didn’t read it the last time I linked to it):
*In studies of what is called the hygiene hypothesis, researchers are concluding that organisms like the millions of bacteria, viruses and especially worms that enter the body along with ‘‘dirt’’ spur the development of a healthy immune system. Several continuing studies suggest that worms may help to redirect an immune system that has gone awry and resulted in autoimmune disorders, allergies and asthma.
These studies, along with epidemiological observations, seem to explain why immune system disorders like multiple sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma and allergies have risen significantly in the United States and other developed countries.
One leading researcher, Dr. Joel V. Weinstock, the director of gastroenterology and hepatology at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said in an interview that the immune system at birth ‘‘is like an unprogrammed computer. It needs instruction.’’
He said that public health measures like cleaning up contaminated water and food have saved the lives of countless children, but they ‘‘also eliminated exposure to many organisms that are probably good for us.Children raised in an ultraclean environment,’’ he added, ‘‘are not being exposed to organisms that help them develop appropriate immune regulatory circuits.’’ *
Sounds like they are finally developing a way to desensitize people with food allergies. Doubt it will be available for humans before I die of old age, but it really is about time. Funny tho that they would rather try to find a cure than explore why “Until 1990, allergy to peanuts was rare, by 1996 one in 200 children were allergic and by 2002 this had rise to one in 70.” Seems to me that it would be far better to prevent than cure.
This bothered me –> “The milk-allergic dogs exhibited a 100% reduction in vomiting and a 60% reduction in diarrhoea.” That is a dog that is milk intolerant, not allergic. Any dog (or human) who hasn’t had milk since babyhood will probably have that sort of a reaction to milk. OTOH, there may not be that much difference in the body between an intolerance and an allergy.
No thanks, not interested in knee jerk negative assumptions. LavenderBlue can’t seem to let it go either.
please see post directly above yours (as just one possible non-vaccine-related explanation, and look at the article - they are now using worms as prevention+cure)
Yeah, there’s that - I was speaking of responsible breeding of dogs. Irresponsible breeders probably don’t even know that there are databases for diseases out there.
This paragraph doesn’t make sense to me. Yes, many pets get booster shots every year, but that doesn’t mean it is a good idea to do so. What does the rest of that paragraph mean?
Lepto is one that is being dropped completely by many dog people, due to the fact that the current vaccination is aimed at strains that dogs are not likely to encounter any more. So it is now possible to vaccinated aganst the DHPP without lepto, and those that think their dogs might have a chance at exposure to lepto will give that shot separately. I haven’t vaccinated against lepto in years, so I didn’t know they do have a new vaccine out for the strains that were previously not covered, but I don’t think I’ll use it. Guess I’ll have to ask my vet if lepto is an issue around here.
I don’t know from pigs, horses, cattle or sheep so I won’t comment on those.
But it is possible that adding the vaccine loads to the natural one could be more than their systems could handle. Particularly since vaccines specifically contain diseases, where as not all or maybe not even most of the natural load is specifically disease causing.
No, I am not talking about that at all - babies born with bad immune systems are not the subject.
Ah. Why does it keep changing?
I don’t believe I’ve said anything to indicate that I think vaccine development has been stopped for pets, nor that I would consider that to be a good thing.
Do you know if there is any actual difference between the shots in a “series” and getting “boosters”?
Uh, OK, so? Varicella vaccine can cause a development disorder?
I know I said something about the adverse effects that hyper-cleanliness is having on modern children upthread someplace. I agree that it is highly likely that it is a major factor in the weak immune systems that children seem to have these days, but I don’t know if it is the only one.
I wish they had said which worms it is that they think kids should be getting from dogs and cats…
Why I am not surprised MsRobyn’s sarcasm (like so much of this thread) went right over your head?
It was mentioned earlier -
This isn’t the absolute answer - we had a cat growing up, and I am allergic to cats right now.
But I might be a better example than I expected - it is not unlikely that, without modern medicine, I would not have survived childhood. And would not, therefore, have grown up to be a cat-allergic adult. This has nothing to do with the number of vaccinations I received, it is an artifact of how vaccination and other medical practices save lives.
Plus, think about it - people nowadays eat an enormously more varied diet than they did even fifty years ago. If you grow up on sorghum and fatback, or rice and beans, an infant who was allergic to the staples of his local diet would die in infancy. If he was allergic to, say, peanuts, and lived his whole life on the Russian steppes where there wasn’t a peanut within a thousand versts, nobody would know that he had a life-threatening allergy if he made to be a hundred. IYSWIM.
The point is that there isn’t any evidence that multiple vaccinations are causing an epidemic of food allergies. Unless you mean something like having an egg allergy and therefore not wanting to be vaccinated with anything grown in eggs, which sometimes happens, but that is a different matter.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m not a doctor, but my son’s pediatrician told me it takes three shots to bring the child up to the full protection level. The second shot is given at least one month after the first, and the third is given six months after the second. The immunity lasts about 25 years.
A “booster” shot is given years after the initial dose as kind of a “reminder” because immunity goes down as time goes on.
I wasn’t clear in my post. I understand that vaccination does not cause autism, nor does it contribute to weakened immune systems. My son has been vaccinated on schedule with the appropriate vaccines, because the zero chance of anything seriously bad happening from the vaccines is far outweighed by the significant chance of something bad happening from a disease, including the risks of permanent disability or death. Having already lost one child from a preventable infection, I’ll be damned if I’ll go through that again.
Oh, yeah, and I wasn’t allergic to penicillin until I reached adulthood. The last dose I took gave me hives. The next dose (if there is one) will likely be my last. I don’t know why or how I became allergic, just that I am.
Robin
That there ARE diseases and there ARE vaccines for which susceptible animals have to get vaccinated every year, sometimes more. Like I mentioned, in the horse, they routinely have to get vaccinated for diseases sometimes more frequent than for humans. Because the vaccines are not good at providing long-term immunity.
Yea, lepto is not routine in many places, and in others they still ask. I’ve given it to my dog because she travelled to places where lepto was much more common and I wanted to protect her. I still give her lepto vaccine, in case she travels again (unlikely). But again, in places where it is more common (swampy Louisiana, for example, other humid wet tropical areas) it is more common to see have it administered (particularly for outside dogs that spend a lot of time in said swampy stagnant water places). And that component is not as long lasting as the other components of the vaccine.
The idea of a vaccine is to give the immune system a large enough dose of the same antigen or antigens they would encounter in an infection, while at the same time NOT causing that disease. For example, a type of vaccine called Modified Live Vaccine is made from viruses/viral particles that have been modified (like the name says) so as to not cause the disease but elicit a response from the immune system. Killed vaccines are generally safer and contain “dead” viral particles. There are other types of vaccines, these are just the 2 basic ones.
The type of virus that influenza is, and the way it replicates inside the cell makes it easier to mutate and change its genomic sequence so as to alter its composition slightly enough that the vaccine is ineffective. Not to mention that there are numerous types of influenza viruses to begin with. If one type is targeted one year, another strain is still free and that is the one that replicates and causes disease.
I would guess the ideal would be a vaccine that can handle them all… and I guess someone somewhere may be researching that.
Sorry for that, your comment about how vaccines have been reduced both in numbers and times administered in dogs made me said that. The vaccines that have been reduced have been found ineffective or more regional than anything else (btw, Parainfluenza is still given in the combo shots, Bordatella is given annually in places that it is given).
So there are fewer now. That doesn’t mean it will remain that way. And it may be that there are fewer diseases that animals get for which the humans decide it is a good thing to vaccinate against.
BTW, vaccines are given in a “series” because it has been determined that there is either interference from the maternal antibodies (which would preclude formation of antibodies by the child/pup) or that even if there has been a response, it is still a weak one, and to get a better, longer lasting one, the animal/baby has to be given the vaccine again.
In a booster, it is assumed that the animal already developed the good response, but that over time it declined. It is more of a wake up to the system to make more antibodies again.
I’m coming back WAY late to the party, but my post is my cite. Also, I’ve known Karl for a while, and even seen pictures.
