VACCINE WARS: The Great Debate
Are you over- or under-vaccinating your horse? Hear both sides of the debate surrounding horse vaccinations to decide what’s best in your situation. Should you or shouldn’t you? All the controversy surrounding horse vaccines has made horse owners anxious. Here’s what you need to know to make the right decision. Vaccination has been called “medicine’s greatest triumph,” responsible for nearly eradicating childhood killers such as polio and smallpox. Vaccinating your horse protects him against equally frightening diseases, including tetanus and sleeping sickness, both of which are almost always fatal. In the past decade, however, vaccine opponents have raised concerns about vaccinations and even begun to question whether they’re necessary at all. Should you continue to vaccinate your horse? If so, which vaccines should you give? It’s hard to know what’s right. In this article, I’m going to investigate the top five arguments I’ve heard made against vaccination in both human and veterinary medicine. While some of the concerns are legitimate, many more are not. Once you’ve heard all sides, I’ll give you a set of rational questions to ask to make educated decisions about your own horse’s vaccination plan. The Arguments Point #1: Vaccines are dangerous. Overheard: “They lead to a hyperstimulated immune system and all kinds of health problems. I’ve read on the Internet that vaccination causes headshaking and allergies in horses, too.” Counterpoint: When it comes to horses, there are no legitimate studies that link vaccination to diseases related to an overstimulated immune system such as allergies or skin disease. The stories you hear are just that...stories. While there may be other reasons to question whether or not to administer a certain vaccine to your horse, this simply isn’t one of them. Point #2: The side effects are awful. Overheard: “OK, so maybe there’s no scientific proof that vaccination causes other diseases, but the side effects from vaccines are horrible. Every time my horse gets vaccinated he can’t lift up his head for days. 8
Death is even possible.” Counterpoint: Yes, vaccinations can cause side effects, some more than others. And this is clearly a legitimate reason to consider your horse’s vaccination program carefully. Some horses are more sensitive to vaccines than others, and if yours is one that seems to have a problem every time he’s vaccinated, you may choose to take the minimal-vaccination route. In this situation, the concept of “herd immunity” comes into play: If 80 percent of the population in a herd is vaccinated, the remaining 20 percent have some protection against a serious outbreak. If your horse is a reactor, you should look at individual vaccines carefully. Vaccines for some diseases are more problematic than others, and different forms of vaccines for the same diseases have different reactivity. Ask your vet to help you decide which vaccines are most important due to exposure risk and severity of disease. Once you’ve decided which diseases are most important to target, look at the different forms of each vaccine available. For example, killed-virus vaccines may not be quite as effective as modified-live-virus vaccines, yet they typically cause much less significant reactions. And intranasal vaccines for respiratory diseases are often much less reactive than their intramuscular counterparts. If you’re considering strangles vaccination (a vaccine with high risk for side effects), you can measure antibody levels in the blood prior to vaccinating; if antibody levels are high, your horse is at greater risk for serious side effects (and could be protected anyway), so don’t vaccinate. Finally, if your horse is exceptionally sensitive, ask your vet whether it would be advisable to administer a dose of a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medication such as flunixin meglumine (Banamine) prior to vaccination to minimize side effects. Point #3: Vaccines are unnecessary. Overheard: “I’ve never known a horse to get any of the diseases we vaccinate against.” Counterpoint: Guess what? I have. And if you’ve ever seen a horse with tetanus, I can promise you won’t ever want to see it again. One of the factors contributing to the current trend against vaccination
is a bit ironic. We live in the vaccination age. Many of us have never seen these diseases, because they’ve been held in check so effectively by vaccination. Young mothers have never seen a child with polio or experienced a measles outbreak, and horse owners have been saved from the heart- ache of watching their horse die of tetanus following a simple wound. Yet if you look around, there are countless examples where serious outbreaks have occurred that could’ve been prevented by vaccination. Eastern equine encephalitis, a form of sleeping sickness, has been on the rise in the United States. Outbreaks have been reported during the past years in many states, including Florida, Michigan, New York, Maine, Georgia, Louisiana, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. This mosquito-borne disease is almost always fatal, can spread to humans, and is completely preventable by vaccination. According to the Center for Disease Control, nine human deaths from EEE have been reported during the past six years. Most of the reported equine cases in recent out- breaks have been in unvaccinated horses. West Nile virus is another interesting case. When this disease first hit the East Coast in 1999, many horses became ill or died. By 2001, a vaccine was developed, and widespread vaccination of horses across the country occurred. As the disease spread west, the incidence and severity declined significantly. The reason? Vaccination clearly played a role. As horses were vaccinated, they became less likely to contract the disease, both limiting its spread and helping to minimize the severity of disease for horses that did become ill. On the human side, measles and whooping cough, two diseases that were unheard of several decades ago, are on the rise. In fact, a number of reported epidemics have included infant deaths, most commonly in areas where parents are turning away from vaccination. The lesson here is that we can’t become complacent. Just because we don’t see the diseases at the barn next door doesn’t mean they no longer exist. Point #4: Vaccines are expensive. Overheard: “You can save hundreds of
VOLUME 4 | ISSUE 10 2018
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