RPM Friday Night Live: Vaxed?

We've got Dr. Brendan Clarke, we've got Dr. Conor Brady, and me. My name's Nick Thompson, and we're just going to jump straight into it because we've been discussing and we've realized that we've opened a massive, massive, massive can of worms here. So Conor, I think you wanted to kick off.

I do, yeah. We're going to get straight before we get— while I absolutely appreciate the fact that we said we were going to get straight into it because we do need 45 minutes for this, I do want to say There we go. I do want to say two things. First of all, thanks to the guys on Patreon, uh, that's really been helping. Thanks to Nick for, uh, fielding a lot of the questions there last week. It's been extremely busy, uh, since we kind of sent people that way, so we appreciate everybody over there. That's where you get Patreon people, you're great, thank you very much.

We're gonna, we're gonna look after you as, as well as we possibly can.

Yeah, no, Connor just can't cope, he's frozen. It's always going to be the way. So we're going to quickly just say, look, uh, thank you to Paleo Ridge who've been great supporters, uh, of us over the last month, two months. Um, and you know, they've, uh, you know, for all of you guys, if you want to just at least pay them a visit on their website, see what they do, uh, thanks to them. Um, you know, they've been a great help to us setting up and doing more for you going forward. So I want to say thank you to them. And remember, you know, if you want to support us out there and you want to join us through Patreon and, you know, look at some of the other stuff, just follow the link through. And, you know, we're on there answering stuff, posting new bits. You know, it's really interesting. We're having discussions about lots of stuff as well. So with reference, lots of follow-up for today too.

Yeah, references and things, guys. What we're going to do is if we do mention any references, we'll try and get those up onto Patreon so that you've got a permanent record, not just, you know, having to go down through a zillion posts on Facebook. I think it's going to be much more— it's going to be a better curated place for having references. Bren, what do you think?

Yeah, it is a lot easier. And just in case you guys are wondering what's happened, Conor started on a rant and I think BT cut the line over the Irish Sea. The Irish SAS moved in and cut the lines before he could start a rant. We're not joking. Big Pharma might have got its feelers out.

They don't want a collapse or a run on the vaccine manufacturers, so the SAS were sent, or whatever they call them, were sent in.

He's here. Oh no, he's managed to get it in for you.

My laptop, lads, I'm going to throw it out the window. Seriously, something's very, very wrong with us. Anyway, we're back.

Um, we thought you'd been taken out by the pharmaceutical industry.

Zoetis Arrow. So where were we?

We're gonna have a run. We've done everything.

Oh, that's great. Okay, so like, light the fuse. Yeah, here we go. So like, you know, let's get straight into the vaccination thing because it's going to be a long one. So I just wanted to bring up a couple of little bits as the non-vet of the gang and say what kind of gets our goats a little bit. But here's a great one from Fortune Business Insights. Veterinary animal vaccine market of $9.75 billion in 2016, in 2018, and just 7 years later by 2025 it's expected to be $16 billion. So it's increasing by about 70% in about 6 years. So vaccines are a very lucrative market at the moment. But here's the facts on pets, okay. In 1997, a meeting of over 500 experts in the vaccination field occurred the first symposium of veterinary vaccines and diagnostics, based on the available evidence at that time, it was agreed that boosters should be given no more than once every 3 years. That was 23, 24 years ago. About 4 years later, Muhsan working on behalf of Pfizer, so they are getting their results themselves, studied 322 client-owned dogs and they found that in most dogs, vaccination induced a response that lasted up to and beyond 4 full years for all 5 antigens tested. Results suggest that revaccination with the same vaccine provides adequate protection even when given less frequently than the traditional 1-year interval.

And remember, this is, uh, yeah, core vaccines. And for, you know, we've posted on Facebook about WSAVA guidelines across the world, um, and even BSAVA, the British Small Animal Veterinary Association in the UK, I still look at the core vaccines as distemper, infectious hepatitis, and parvovirus. Okay, those are the ones which will last that long and longer. In fact, we're going to discuss how long.

We're just saying here that they actually have, since 2008, challenge studies of 7 years. Now we've got challenge studies of 9 years that they last beyond 9 years. And Schultz, to quote Schultz, who's the boss man in all this, uh, like, since 2008 we've known they've lasted 7 years with challenge studies. So they tried to give the animal the, the, the infection. But to quote Schultz in 2006, revaccination fails to stimulate a secondary response as a result of interference by existing antibodies. A practice that was started many years ago that lacks scientific validity or verification is annual revaccinations. Almost without exception, there is no immunological requirement for annual revaccination. Immunity to virus persists unless you're talking about bacteria. So what I just wanted to point out was that, like, this move to re-vaccinate annually, like, re-vaccinate annually, like, there's not a sign, there's no study I can find out there that indicates vaccines wear off after a year for these core viruses.

So that's, that's, we'll talk about this a bit more. Remember you talked about except for the bacteriology ones, and that's the lepto.

Yeah, but for puppies adequately vaccinated for viruses Okay, and the property schedule has been done for viruses, which is the majority of the vaccines that you give them. We know that they last. And so this idea of annual boosting, is it true that they just— some vaccine manufacturer had the idea to say good for a year on the back of the packet and the veterinary community leaked?

That's what happened in the old days, but then in, in the early noughties, a group— I'd like to think that Brendan and I were part of it— a group of homeopathic vets got together with, um, uh, the canine health concern, Catherine O'Driscoll, who pushed this. And I think we were influential in going from PhD and Lepto every single year to PhD every 3 years. And, and which is fantastic. Yeah, that's reduced the amount of insult to the body by 3. However, The guidelines say that 3 years is the most frequent that you should give the PHD vaccines. It doesn't say give it every 3 years, it says 3 years is the maximum. It could be 4, it could be 5, it could be 7, could be 9. I'm not sure we're going to talk about immunity checks later on in this. Yeah, you can do a titer test.

I think I was kind of just getting cross about the fact that here's just another example. If we compare like cereal-based dry food there isn't a head-to-head study that would ever convince you that it might be a good idea over well-made raw dog food. So is this, is this just another example of an evidence-based, you know, scientific—

I think it started off with dogma of, you know, because of what happened in the very early days when the vaccines first came out and, you know, they were relatively poor and they have been improving over time. You know, they were worried about, well, how long do they last? Well, this seems to work if we do it on an annual basis. I mean, look, some of the vaccines were reported at down at, you know, 40 to 50% when we first started giving parvo vaccines, okay, in the, you know, early '80s or late '70s, early '80s. You know, that's the sort of rates at which you were getting, you know, um, effectiveness, uh, as in it was seeming to cover that number of dogs, they were getting an immune response. Yeah, they've obviously improved massively since then. I mean, some of them will quote 95% on a single shot, you know, will be covered, you know, within 2 weeks. Yeah, so that's—

yeah, so this explains, I suppose, a bit of the hangover maybe from, from back in the day for, for guys that were practicing maybe, you know, 30, 40 years ago. What about, like, you know, um, anyway, look, I just want to— I think maybe is it a bit of it that they believe that there's no side effects to it? If I just wanted to read, like, there is side effects to over-vaccinating pets. I mean, surely you we all know this. I mean, we've known since 1999. It explains up to 26% of immune-mediated hemolytic anemia, which is one of the popular autoimmune diseases in dogs. It's linked to hypothyroidism. And so Moncrieff found in 2002 that the vaccination of pet and research dogs for rabies induced the production of anti-thyroglobulin autoantibodies, a crucial finding with implications for the subsequent development of hypothyroidism as well as encephalitis, jaundice, organ failure, collapse, cancer, autoagglutinated red blood cells. So we know the side effects and more worrying is the timeline of these side effects for these heavier, more chronic diseases. It's not like a vaccine goes in and your dog just turns belly up with his feet in the air, okay, like a cartoon character. Like authors Dodds and Geiger state delayed type immunological responses can take 10 to 28 days to set in in dogs. The onset of any autoimmune diseases takes 30 to 45 days post-vaccination. There is no way on earth a conventional vet is going to attribute that autoimmune issue in my pet 45 days later with, you know, the jab he got a while ago.

Absolutely right. But that's the beauty of the SARS stuff, okay? The more people have a reaction and they look at their vaccine records and they state whether they've had that and they include it in the reaction forms, and I posted earlier this year, and we can raise that one to the top so that people know how to report this stuff. A vet doesn't have to report it, it can be anybody, it can be years down the line. So if your dog has been suffering with immune-mediated haemolytic anaemia and you know that they were vaccinated in early stages before your dog was diagnosed and then you've stopped, you can still report it 5 years later. Okay, so you should go on that site and you should write down, did you know my dog had these vaccines and it had this disease? And you should go out there.

And will that— will those numbers count? Will this— what you're talking about— when we will put up a link to the website after this— will those numbers count towards vaccine side effects that we read about?

So they limited— they limited initially, uh, to a 3-week post-administration of a medicine. There have been complaints and they said they would continue to monitor. So what happens is the more complaints that come in that they feel that it should be attributed to that thing, even if it's 6 weeks, 12 weeks, 12 years on, you know, they need to have the number of reports to say they can look at the stats. If there's only 1 or 2 reports coming in, there's no way they can draw any conclusions from it. So I would just implore all of you guys, you know, if any of you've had experience you should report it. It's not a, I know it's this, it's a, I suspect that there was a reaction.

It's a suspected adverse reaction, and you can suspect it just as much as your vet can suspect it, or a vet nurse, or whoever can suspect it. You just go to the VMD website and follow your nose.

We'll bring it up to the top.

And just, I'll finish on this regarding on who's most affected. And so I'm pretty staggered at this. I want to see if it's true, guys. Toy dogs are way more effective than any other dog. The smaller the dog, the more likely you are to have a vaccine reaction. Is it true that there's no range of doses for vaccines in dogs of different sizes? Like, is a Great Dane going to get the same jab as a Pom? I mean, is all the same amount of adjuvant that's suitable for a Dane going into a Pom? I mean, that's already what—

so this is the thing, the amount of virus, okay, in the need for stimulating an immune response, because that is a really small part of the vaccine. And if anything, I think somebody's already commented, it would be the cleaner part of the vaccine. It's the other stuff that they stick in to irritate the immune system that's more dose-dependent— the thiomersals, the, you know, many of them say they've washed it out of the vaccines now, but it's still there. There's adjuvants like aluminium hydroxide that goes in there. There's protein levels, so you know, you wonder about, you know, we talk about foods a lot, we talk about food sensitivities, we talk about sensitivity to beef. Well, the number of things that have beef albumin in them within this to grow that virus on or to be part of what's going on, all the way through to in the bacterial parts of the vaccines, which we'll talk about, all the way through to the egg, which is part of what they're growing the viruses on. Can often be contained within those vaccines, and that's the components that we get more concerned about in many cases than necessarily the viruses themselves.

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association actually say that, that the bacterial vaccines, specifically leptospirosis, has a worse record for adverse reactions, and it's pretty well recognized now that the Lepto 4, the new Lepto, has an even worse reputation— reputation, thank you, Conor— than the Lepto 2, which is the old one. Yeah, it covered for 2 strains. The new one covers for 4 strains, and it's considered— they actually say in the World Small Animal Veterinary Association guidelines 2017, they say that you should avoid vaccinating toy breeds with the Lepto vaccine. They actually say that. And yeah, they actually say that. That's one thing, but what about vaccinating a toy puppy? Yeah, yeah, it, it, it's—

so breeders are doing it now as a matter of course. So, uh, we're going to come back to the leptospirosis thing, Nick, because you've got—

yeah, I've got lots of those.

I want to learn about it. But, um, the idea of like we're now just getting puppies where breeders just lash in the, the vaccination because it's no harm, it's this idea that no harm, you know, that's the whole— there's no side effects to it. It's so casually accepted. So what if we annually boost? So what if it, you know, brings a client in to get a health check? Well, it's like, no, because there's side effects to these boosters. They don't need that kick in the immunological stones every year, you know.

It's— yeah, if you vaccinate a healthy animal who has had the vaccine last year, and Brendan was alluding to this, No, for you, it has no effect. Yeah, it's like if you go to the garage with a full tank of petrol in your car, you can't fill it any further. And that's exactly the same analogy. So, so, so, and you are even every 3 years, if you've got good antibodies and you give the same vaccine, it's just going to get, get, get eaten up by the antibodies and will have zero effect. And this was known 30 years ago. Professor Hal Thompson at Glasgow University was saying this 30 years ago.

No relation.

So what's the— what can somebody give us some advice now? What do we— what's next? Who's up next? I mean, what do we do?

Well, I wanted to ask you actually, Conor, because, uh, a lot of the— this new craze for early vaccines, you know, with the socialization issue that I have with it, you know, people banging in vaccines at 6 weeks of age.

What on earth?

You you know, is actually pointed at these people that deal with behaviour, Conor.

Yeah.

And, you know, talking about early socialisation and habituation and stuff like that, and I know you worked for an organisation a long time ago that was getting puppies out on streets and trying to get them socialised. So tell me, tell me, what, you know, where are the studies these days that really mean that we should be doing that?

Studies, I'm not sure, but I know that when we were in Guide Dogs like, like I was the pup supervisor in there. We have to get those pups on the streets at 8 weeks old. And we, first of all, everybody knew that maternal antibodies last, so that's why you don't start your, your vaccination schedule for a little bit after that. I mean, you're going to give us the plan to do it and that kind of stuff later, but I do believe some of the lads are pushing it way back. You know, Schultz is at 15, 16 weeks before he starts off. And this gives conventional vets a dilemma because they see that 8-week to 16-week period of people walking around with their dogs and as a time to pick up diseases. But the point is, if you are living with that dog for the next 16, 20 years, he's got to be socialized properly. It's your duty to socialize him because that's a huge part of his health. He's got to understand that buses and air brakes in the face aren't scary and big dogs barking and different people. And so it's called the imprinting period and it wears off very quickly, around 16 to 20 weeks depending, you know, I'm sure the science is moving along since I was told this. So by 16 weeks, the imprinting period is snapping shut. So you, if you want a dog to be okay with trains, buses, they've got to see that 4, 5, 6 times very positively. Out in the streets meeting other dogs, this stuff is normal and they learn their licks very, very young and they remember them as well. So you can't teach an old dog new tricks. You can, but it's like teaching granny how to use a laptop or your 2-year-old, you know. So there is a, you can change things later, but this socialization period for behaviorists is so critical. So you have to get the dogs out in the streets. Keeping them wrapped up inside your house is not in the dog's best interests except in terms of picking up diseases.

This is where I would come in and say, look, there's a difference between socialization and habituation. Yeah, and habituation you can do for, you know, we've done this for years now. We've delayed vaccines. We get them to 16 to 20 weeks before they get vaccinated, but we'll talk about how to do that in a moment. You know, if we at all can persuade people to do that, that's where we're will go, but we have some people that go early and you just got to say, look, you can lift these little puppies. Yeah, you know, you can. Yeah, the viruses don't jump. The viruses are going to be caught through them getting it on their paws or face to face.

Yeah, corners, up by walls, lampposts, like, or your shoes.

Yeah, you know, so you letting your shoes be chewed by your puppy because you couldn't be bothered to take them off at the door and you've just left them in the house, you know, those are the places that they're going to pick up, you know, virus. If you're in a heavily infested area, you know, so city centers, you know, heavy populations of dogs, those sort of areas, then you're more at risk. If you are like Nick out in the countryside, in leafy suburbs, you know, beautiful surroundings, you know, one dog every 3 miles, you know, you don't need to give the level of protection that early on. You know, you've got woodland, woodland floor, great for stimulating the immune system. Yeah, this is the whole thing about where they get their immunity, their challenges from. So you've got to look at coming back for a moment. You can lift these dogs, you can get over-shoulder bags, you can get the little handcart trolleys, pushchairs, those sort of things. You can get them to experience these noises without necessarily the risks that's going on there.

I go one foot, one further than that. I will say to them that I would like them to go to 16 weeks before they have the vaccine. And at my practice, we only do parvo alone. We don't do lepto, we don't do distemper and hepatitis, but that's perhaps another story we can discuss. But what I do say is it's your obligation after we talk about the pros and cons of vaccinating early and late and no sodes and not— and no vaccination whatsoever. We talk about all that stuff, but the important thing is that your job is to expose that puppy to as much of life as possible, but not in doggy areas. You get disease from doggy areas. So the beach is, is generally fine because it's washed twice a day. You go to places in the woods where no other people take their dogs. You go to plowed fields, you go off the beaten track. And I think that as long as you realize that you're not playing the game that the manufacturer would like you to play, i.e., we will guarantee if you do it our way, we will guarantee you'll be okay, which we can't do, by the way. And that's what we do, say you socialize the dog as much as possible in your garden, in your friend's gardens, in your friend's houses.

Walk the dog in the middle of the street, but keep his nose away from dirty, like the walls where the leaves blow. We were told to avoid any clumps of leaves because that's where the wind blows and lamp posts. So you can walk in estates, have a lot of dogs around, but you can still put your dog down if he's on his own and walk down a path as long as he's not, you know, licking dirty ditches and stuff. And if, as Bren says, if chaos is up ahead, you pick your dog up. And you can have really vaccinated dogs. Why couldn't you socialize with vaccinated dogs in your back garden? I mean, I honestly—

yeah, yeah, no, they absolutely say you very well can. It does say in the guidelines, actually, look, as long as you know they're vaccinated dogs Yeah, and they're healthy. Yeah, they're not poorly, because even if they're vaccinated, if they're poorly, they can carry all sorts of stuff. Yeah, so it's the point of shedding, boys.

What about shedding? I mean, kennel cough vaccine, inverted commas, you're a shedder after that. So what about the rest of the jabs? Could you— do you shed after anything?

Yeah, let's talk about that for a moment. If you're shedding kennel cough vaccine, okay, you're actually shedding pig Bordetella. Then you're going to get a rel— you're not shedding a canine Bordetella, so you're not actually getting the Bordetella issue. You're just vaccinating the other dogs around you with porcine Bordetella. They may get a cough for 2 or 3 days, but it's not going to be a honking cough for 6 months.

So a kennel cough, a Bordetella vaccinated dog can't spread Bordetella in kennels?

It can only spread the vaccine strain. It can't— it's not picking up a different, um, vaccine.

I thought that was true.

That's a good convert to— you know, it's the pig Bordetella that they've got. The issues that you've got is that too many people think that Bordetella is the only part of the kennel cough complex. There is about 20 different viruses and bacteria, from Pasteurellas to through to parainfluenzas, you know, influenzas, all sorts of minor viruses, even coronaviruses that can actually cause coughs in your dog. So you can't assume— what you're doing is you're vaccinating against whooping cough, okay? The one that makes those dogs and children, okay, for the human version, cough and cough and cough and can't sleep and they're tired out and it's repeatable horrible cough, okay? It's devastating. It's really rare, okay? It is really rare to come across a true Bordetella kennel cough, okay?

However, if you had to choose one of the vaccines, I think that the kennel cough would be the least, uh, noxious of all of them because it does go where it's supposed to go, whereas through the membrane, Parvo and Distemper through here but we then shove it in here. And so there's going to be some confusion with help us out and all this kind of stuff.

So I have to disappoint you. They've brought out an injectable version. Nobody joking.

Jesus. Because dogs don't like it at their noses and they don't want to disappoint their clients. That's what it is.

I also used to just get them to open their mouths and fire it at the back. In fact, I got that from John Saxton.

Yeah, it doesn't— the guidelines say that the—

I used to do all sorts to get around putting up their noses.

Doesn't the guidelines say that it doesn't lend itself to vaccination?

That disease doesn't lend itself to vaccination because worldwide there was an injectable form, but it's really, really poorly— um, again, it's one of these vaccines that's you know, when you give it, it only really covers a very low number of dogs if you inject it. And worldwide, there was— there's been an injectable available for about 20-plus years, and it's just we've never used it in the UK. We've always used the intranasal one, which is far more effective, but just there's never been really a consistent understanding of you, you know, it's like taking the, the whooping cough vaccine for children and expecting it to cover against all coughs that that child will ever get from school, you know. That'd be laughable. It might just be that they only get a 7-day cough, which we don't care about.

Guys, can I ask you, uh, what you have vaccinated your dogs with and why? Uh, Conor?

Uh, Dudley's 7 now. He got vaccinated Uh, twice as a pup, I think. Yeah, honest to God, I can barely remember. So good question. But it was definitely the most he got was 3-in-1 because you struggled to find— like, honest to God, if it was my choice, I'd put in Parvo and that's it, in my opinion. But I'm not a vet, but I can have a say. It's my dog and I'd probably just put in Parvo. I don't see a point to the rest of them. But, um, Parvo virus, I got 3-in-1 was the minimum I could get, and I got it either once or twice. I can't remember. Nothing since. I haven't tied or tested. I haven't looked under the bonnet. I'm just assuming it's worked, but that's a little bit sloppy, so I wouldn't be giving— taking my advice.

Cool. Bren, where'd you go?

Yeah, so this is interesting because we've done 25 years of taking titer tests and vaccine checks and stuff like that. So I do see the viruses that are naturally stimulating because we've got dogs that don't get vaccinated, they just get exposed. And so— and you will tell the difference when you're doing a virus neutralizing antibody test, a titer test, the more expensive one costs over £100 usually, and it's, you know, that's the lab costs for doing these now for distemper, hepatitis parvo, and you can see them go up into the 20,000s. And you get 20,000 for infectious hepatitis, you know that's a wild-type virus that stimulated your dog. And I've had that for my own dogs, but fortunately my protocol has always been vaccinate as late as possible. I mean, for Artie, you've seen my spaniel around on various pictures and stuff She didn't get vaccinated till 20 weeks. A single shot, a single shot of distemper hepatitis parvo was enough to give her cover at that point. I took her into woodlands, I was out in the remote stuff and everything else. Single shot of that has covered her and she gets now vaccine checked and she's still immune. However, lepto is a different story. Now there is, um, we do see Lepto coming into the practice. We get a lot of referrals. Um, I was saying to these guys earlier, um, this evening just about the fact that, look, you've got to understand there's about 25 different serovars, and I'm not going to steal too much of Nick's thunder, but there's about 25 serovars that can cause disease in dogs in the UK.

Strains, different strains, different strains.

There are about 250 50 total leptos, you know, huge numbers out there, some of which might cause things, you know, that they're even investigating things like the Alabama rot and things like that as to whether they're connected to these, these Cerevars and some strains. So I have definitively just said, look, I know that where they go in the lakes, it's a risk assessment thing. If I had to have a little toy dog that stayed in my arms and on the sofa next to me, then I wouldn't vaccinate them any more than I would vaccinate my daughters, okay, against lepto. If I've got an arty who, she is in every puddle that's an inch deep, she's in the water trough, she's, you know, of every single, you know, cattle whatever is going on. She would be in there. She chases rats, she eats rats and mice from the field, you know, all of that stuff. So she gets one, but I choose one that doesn't have an adjuvant in it, doesn't have thiamersal even in the making of the product. They actually— these are the guys that I was talking to for 20 years about, can they not do something about not using thiamersal? And just as we were looking at other vaccines, they brought out the one that doesn't have thiomersal in at all.

Mercury-based preservative, which they have removed from virtually every—

used it to kill the— yeah, to kill, to kill the bacteria so they're no longer alive. Um, and, and it also acts as a preservative to some degree because it's an antibacterial, but it's a horrible one. You wouldn't do that. If you smash the bottle, you're supposed to get the hazmat team in to clean the consult room.

It's only a little bit, guys. It's only a little bit.

They're injecting—

okay, so Artie gets a Lepto and your Labrador?

Yeah, yeah, so she does too because she's the same. They're both water babes. They both will drink from everything, but I use that particular one.

What's the vaccine? Spill the beans.

So that's the Eurican L-Multi.

Okay, Eurican, E-U-R-I-C-A-N. Would you be able to write it up?

Maybe we'll post it after the show, guys. We'll post it.

Yeah, yeah. So now you will have to ask for these separately, okay, because not that many vets will even think about this as an issue. And we stock 3 different lepto options because we have a full range of people that will come in and demand that they have, you know, those. We try and persuade them in most cases not to even have it unless they absolutely need it. But you must understand, guys, it's all about an individual risk assessment, you know, and you've got to look at what your relative risk is.

Can I ask a question about risk, good friend? It's just while we're on this, and Nick, we need to find out what you vaccinate your adults with. So, so, Ben, tell me this, all right? How many dogs have you had through your clinic that have not been vaccinated for leptospirosis that got leptospirosis?

Well, the problem is I've also had dogs that are vaccinated against leptospirosis.

Yeah, no, that's not asking because we know, we know most of the cases you have. It seems in this—

so, um, yeah, there'll be a lady who may be even watching tonight that her dog we definitively chose not to vaccinate against leptospirosis but her dog got leptospirosis autumnalis, okay, which is not within the vaccine protocol anyway, but did get leptospirosis.

Okay, how widely— how, like, from a risk point of view, you're asking us to kind of go based on risk, but with nobody to ask, because if you ask a conventional vet, what's the risk of eating bones? Jeez, it's lethal, it's going to kill them. So that's no risk that I'm going to go by. So I, I fear that if I ask a conventional vet what's the risk of any disease, they're just now at 7 and 1. They believe that those other 6 diseases are just so prevalent, if you don't take the vaccination, your dog's gonna die. I don't agree with that.

Yeah, I think we really have to say distemper is quite rare in the UK, like very rare in the UK, and hepatitis is not that common in the UK.

The downside is the Romanian imports, Nick, for distemper, huge, huge. I've got 2 Romanian vets work with us. They know it's a huge problem out there. I have seen it in Romanian imports, you know, for the first time in 20 years. So the last one I saw was actually in a vet's down south that had seizure problems, and I thought, you know, it was pretty much dead and buried, you know, as far as a disease that we would consider a problem. And yet we are getting so many imports now where actually we're reintroducing the prevalence of these viruses back into the country.

But how prevalent is it? Romanian imports is fairly small.

Yeah, no, no, absolutely. It's got to be so that people are aware of it. Yeah.

So dogs not vaccinated for leptospirosis to get leptospirosis, it's not exactly— I wonder, is that an annual occurrence? Do you see one dog a year? You've got a big busy vet.

We probably, yeah, we probably only get about 2 to 3 out of 5,000 dogs.

Most of them are vaccinated for leptospirosis, I'd warrant. That's my bet.

Are they vaccinated or not, Brendan?

Yeah, it's the not vaccinated ones I'm after.

Yeah, no, that's the— I would say that's the not vaccinated.

Oh, so it does happen, um, but it's not a lot, you know.

That's still a low prevalence, really.

Conor, tell us about the Swiss study you were talking about, the, uh, the mountain.

I can only find a very short kind of segment out of it, but it was much juicier than this. But here's what I have of it. I was just talking about, yeah, MAJOR-ADAL 2014 is the study, Nick, okay. But this is only my notes, I don't know where I found the rest of it. Investigated a minor outbreak of leptospirosis in Bern, Switzerland. They focused on a single veterinary hospital in where 298 dogs were found to have contacted leptospirosis over 10 years. Vaccination history was available for 250 of these dogs, which is 84%. Of these, 96% have been adequately vaccinated against leptospirosis. That's in a country that is like, you know, 50/50 on whether they— but there was more to that study. I can't remember what the rest of that study was, but canine health concern in 1997 post-vaccination survey, 3,800 candidates, and they found that leptospirosis, if your dog got it, it happened within 3 months of a vaccination. 100% of cases within 3 months of a vaccination, you know. So that should have been 25% every 3, every quarter. But in fact 100% of cases happen within 3 months of the vaccination, which is really interesting. So that's all I know. I kind of put that in the no way bubble. And but that's so dangerous because I don't know how to believe anymore, you know.

And then it's really hard because quite a lot of the, uh, leptos will go under the radar, okay, because the majority of cases you don't see anything for years because the kidneys don't just tip over and fail. They just trickle and it ticks along and then they end up with renal failure in older life and you don't really know what the cause was because they're well beyond the infection. And so there's all sorts of elements that's insidious about that disease and that's a really difficult one. But in its own right, we do get— the thing is I'm in a slightly different position because I also get referral work where I see some of these things and I've got to review. I get the wonderful torch of hindsight of looking at, you know, all of the stuff that the vets have done. And then I can sort of go, oh, why didn't they see this? And you sort of like, you suddenly do the tests and there you go, you can find these cases. So it's a little bit unfair for me to say that these guys are missing it, but many of them don't know the prevalence because they're not looking. And, you know, and because it's not being looked at, even SABSnet and things like that which are looking for prevalence aren't really finding this level. There are some things that are brought out by the vaccine companies, but you always take that with a pinch of salt because that's what we should do as scientists. You know, if you've got somebody selling something to you and they come to you and say, you need this because I've got this little model of disease going on, you, you go, really? Um, you know, but that's We are—

there's no way we're going to get our subjects finished because Nick wants to talk about tighter testing.

Yeah, just one second. Heather Eden very astutely says, I think all Romanian imports are vaccinated, and yet, Bren, you're saying that they're saying— are they not vaccinated? I think most of them are.

I think they will be vaccinated, but this is the whole issue of You know, if you vaccinate an animal after it's already got the disease, it's not curative. And most of them are coming from rescue kennels. So most of these are street dogs, okay, that are then being rescued and brought across. And vaccination does not stop them, you know, it doesn't cure them of the disease they already have.

In fact, if you look at the data sheets of all the disease and most vaccines actually, but all the, all the veterinary vaccines that I know, it does, it says that it will reduce the symptoms of disease. It doesn't say it will prevent disease, which I think is really, really important. I'll tell you about Bluebell and Mouse. So Bluebell is now 2 years old. She's a whippet Italian Greyhound, so she's slightly small, not toy by any means. And she got— I gave her a single parvo shot at about 19 weeks and nothing else since. And that's it. Mouse, however, she's about 20, 22 weeks now, and I haven't yet given her the leptospirosis. And the reason is that I thought Bluebell was slightly itchy for her first 6 months or so, and every time she itched, I felt so guilty. There may be no link, but I felt very guilty.

Let's face it, they're not really water dogs in the same way that—

they're in water and muck and grot all the time. Well, you know, it's like I live in a tiny little village and there's a farm at either end, so there's a lot of mud in between. So, and we've got rats, we've got rats under the shed, we've got rats under the wood pile. So, and I'm not, definitely not giving leptospirosis. And, you know, one of the things is if they do get leptospirosis and we get in early with a suspected lepto, you can give an antibiotic. Yeah, doxycycline, you can get in with that, and sometimes that would help if you get in there early enough. Okay, cool. So there you go. That's where I am.

19:39, and we do have to mention tire testing. We do need to give some advice here, and we do need to get to this leptospirosis.

For all of those guys that asked about, all those guys that asked about the nose aids, look, I've put a post on about the nose-oad situation. So look on our Facebook page, that really pretty much deals with that. You've got to individualize it. Vaccine nose-oads are not the same as disease nose-oads. You've got to be very, you know, distinct about how you use those. And, you know, please talk to your holistic homeopath. Yeah, okay.

Any studies behind them, guys?

Yes, there are, there are. And the book, actually, the book to read, there's one by a guy called Dr. Dr. Isaac Golden, and it's called Vaccination Homeoprophylaxis. That's a really interesting one to read. And there's another one, the Cuban Leptospirosis Study 2012. Just Google the hell out of that and you'll get some good stuff on nosodes. If you talk to your regular vet about nosodes, they will throw their hands up in the air. But I don't think it's quite as simple as that. And individual, as Brendan says, individualizing I think is the way to go there, and taking responsibility. Nothing is perfect. Let's— yeah, nothing is perfect. Yeah, okay, that's for sure.

So that's in there. So look, vaccine checks and titers, we've had some questions, some posts about, you know, what there's expenses and different things like that. And remember some of them will be prices with and without health checks. And depending where you are in the country, you know, the health check actually to me is the most important part about your visit. You know, you can just shelve the vaccine if you just said to them, I want to consult just so that we can just check about what my animal's doing. That would be what you should be doing. Okay, that's probably more important than anything to do with the vaccination, but The same thing with the titers, you know, some will include the price of a consultation, some won't. Remember, if you go for a virus neutralizing antibody titer, which is much more detailed, much looking at not just the quantity of antibody that's in there but the strength of reaction, so how well it fits to the virus and neutralizes it, okay, that is the more expensive test. You go to BioBest in Edinburgh or Glasgow University those are the two big labs. Most of the other labs will send it to one of those two to get that done, and it generally costs, um, depending on how much discount and how many tests you're doing with those labs, will cost between £90 and £120.

There you go. For the in-depth one, that's the one, that's the partial one.

Okay, WSAVA say that the vaccine check, which is just like a pregnancy test, it's posh pregnancy test. It's good enough, it is industry standard.

How much is that?

So that's, we'll work out depending again how many you do because they come in groups of 12 tests together. So if you're doing 12 dogs, and so we line up enough of 12 tests to do them all together so that it keeps the cost down. So it can be in the region of about after about £25 thereabouts to run each test. But then you put the health check on or whatever you need to do. So that's the rough cost if you're just doing those. But remember, it's also about who's reading the tests and who's interpreting the tests, because you can get anybody doing those. But if they've only been doing it for a week or they've been doing it for the odd cases, and as soon as one of them is maybe slightly on the pale side when it's reacting, because this is a semi-quantitative test. It looks at basically, um, the, the, the color change. It's an immunoassay that looks at color change as to how many antibodies are in that system. Now the reason the WSABA said, look, this is satisfactory, is because they reckon with the amnestic response, if you've got antibodies circulating, they should be covered against these viruses. Because as soon as they get the virus, those cells will kick into producing more antibodies, and therefore you should be able to cover. So the, the thing that you really want to see is a series. The reason for repeating these, if maybe once a year or maybe more frequently, you know, they even talk on the diagram that we, we put on one of the Facebook posts about testing after you've just done the vaccine. So maybe within 6 months of doing the vaccines is because if you can see that they've had a positive result on the VaxiCheck and then you see one of them starts to fade off a bit, you can be fairly confident that they've got an amnestic response and maybe even a cellular immunity also ongoing. And therefore you don't need to be panicking about the one thing that they've started to dip in. And it's understanding that just because one thing's low, if two other things are high and their immune system's working well and they've been exposed then there is no need to suddenly go, oh my God, we've got to do everything.

Yeah, it's not just about antibodies. Like you said, there's cellular immunity as well, which isn't measured. There is. So, so why—

there's just no test out there for it, you know. The CD4, CD8 counts, as we would always talk to them about, you know, when you're looking at things like HIV, you know, uh, status and stuff like that, you just can't do for these viruses. It's so expensive, you know, £300 and you might just scrape the barrel with that.

Guys, please, simply, simply speaking, at 19:40 35. Yes, simply speaking, you can do a test after you've vaccinated to check that the vaccine has actually done its job. You can do a test every year if you want, or if you have to show something to kennels, or you can do it every 3 years legitimately if you had reasonable antibodies. So it's either straight after, 1 year, or 3 years seems to be what most people will do.

So best advice for a puppy, uh, a puppy, we've just got a puppy, she's 8 weeks old, when do we take them down to the vets and what are we asking for?

Take them down for a checkup, yeah, make sure that they are— get used to the vets, you know, that's an experience that they need to have, okay, but state that to them that you're not going there for the vaccine on that, this is a checkup and get used to and an explorer of what you want to do with your puppy and then look at, you know, the individual risks for where you are in your area try and get a prevalence of disease, you know, ear to the ground. Remember, too many people talk about parvo out there when it's actually hemorrhagic gastroenteritis. Okay, there's lots of different bacterial diseases that can cause that, you know, diarrhea and sickness with blood. And unless it's absolutely proven with a test that this is parvo, there are so many newspaper articles that go out there, parvo's in the area.

I've seen it, it's devastating, it's horrible. So I actually thought it was just parvo. So what age, Bren, are you starting? Nick, and what age are you guys starting? If— well, actually, you've kind of told me what—

yeah, push them as late as possible. 16 weeks is what they advise, you know. Dr. Conor Brady would say 16 weeks, you only need a single shot of distemper hepatitis parvo.

A single shot only of 3-in-1 licensed as well. A single shot of 3-in-1 at 16 weeks, and then a titer test to see if it's taken and there's been no clash with the maternal antibodies.

Yeah, and your obligation is to socialize them safely.

Yeah, safe socialization, that's a really key word there that was missing from that. There was something else that came up there a while ago, one of the questions about, look, your insurance companies. So we've got a terrible over here in Ireland, it's a complete racket because we've only got a couple and they're Anyway, I shouldn't say too much about them, but in the UK, so what you can do with the guys, with the insurance companies, is that you can ring them, and if it's in your policy, which is quite rare now, but sometimes it's in your policy that if your pet isn't vaccinated each year, your policy is null and void. So car crashes, a kid runs over—

only against those viruses?

No, some policies, I'm telling you, Brand, against a website insurance company, I've just pretty much told you who it is. Certainly, certainly a couple of years ago your policy was null and void, so claims weren't being made based on vaccination schedules because you haven't seen the— perhaps that's part of the annual checkup that we didn't do. Anyway, look, the point is, if you're worried about your vaccinations, you simply ring the insurance company and you— if that is a requirement of theirs, you can get that disease written out of your insurance policy, which is an option should you want to stay with such a company. Um, but that, that is where it starts to fall down because insurance companies are demanding annual vaccination.

Yeah, well, we, we had an argument with them about this because actually the— well, it's also now 3 years anyway for most of those, but it was only about the viruses that they— if they weren't vaccinated at all and you didn't titrate test and you couldn't prove immunity or anything like that, then they excluded the, um, those viruses. If they came down and it was proven that those were the things and you had ignored that, yeah, it wouldn't cover for that treatment.

That's fair enough.

However, what they have pushed that back to now is if you can prove immunity, they should be covered, okay, for whatever. But it is also written into most of these policies that there is an annual health check done to rule out if there's any ongoing disease or other disease, because many of those companies are reliant on looking at that history to see, has this disease been going on? Should it have been written out as an exclusion or not? And that's what it is. So it's actually about the annual health check. This is a really important bit.

Okay, could you recommend an annual health check?

Yeah, totally. And so does the WSAVA. Guys, I think we should do another one on vaccines for all the stuff that we haven't talked about in about a month's time. What do you reckon?

Yeah, yeah, the adult stuff.

I think definitely it's a great topic. It's great and it's really juicy.

Yeah.

Okay, so let's Let's think about that.

What are we doing next week?

What are we doing next week?

We already knew what we were doing. I can't remember what it is now.

Carbs. You asked for carbs on Patreon.

Carbs and blood. Yeah, absolutely. That's a huge topic. There's one that needs a part 1, 2, and 3, that does.

Okay, we will do the essence of carbs in 7 days.

The essence of carbs.

The essence.

We will distill like a fine whiskey. The, the, the elixir of life out of carbs and deliver that to you. And I give you some references on Patreon. Somebody was saying that they don't understand Patreon. Basically, everybody gets together, puts a few quid— they just say, I'm going to give you a coffee, whatever, a few quid every month. That's it. And if you could pay 3 quid, that's like a cup of coffee. So forget about it.

It's on here.

And, uh, yeah, it's just everybody's just so that we can, we can get somebody to help us with our admin because we're getting pretty overwhelmed with our admin. That's really all it is. It's just you're helping us to give you content because we want— that's what we want to do.

And thanks again to Paleo Ridge there, paleoridge.co.uk. They're fantastic. They've been very good to us for the last few months and sponsors again tonight. So check them out on their, on their new website. So that's it, guys. Look, you send your questions or we'll get your questions on patreon.com/wholepetmedics. And as always, thanks for being here. I just love it. I just love doing this. It's great.

It's great.

I'm going downstairs to put two kids to bed.

Thanks for giving us your time, Conor. Yeah, it's great. Cheers, guys. Thank you. Thank you to everyone out there. Speak to you soon.

Bye-bye.

Keep waving, Nick.