Lyme Vaccine
Today, my vet gave my 5 month old Pembroke Welsh Corgi a vaccination for Lyme disease (the second is to follow in 3 weeks). I really respect my vet, and didn't want to argue with him, but now I am having second thoughts, as I have read they are ineffective and possibly unsafe. Has anyone had experience with, or does anyone have an opinion on, the safety of this vaccine?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Susan Marie Kovalinsky on
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Thank you for this. Helps to balance out my perspective, and is reassuring. I tend to be a pessimist, and I become frightened at "what ifs " and things I read online. Again, thanks.
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Permalink Reply by Beth on
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I think part of the reason the vaccine is controversial is because so little is known about the disease. When people get long-term auto-immune-type disease after a Lyme infection, is it truly a byproduct of the disease itself, or is it a coincidence? Does the body ever clear the disease, or is long-term low-grade infection possible?
With dogs, everything you read says that 95% of infected dogs are asymptomatic. But then I read another study where upon necropsy after death from other causes, the majority of Lyme-positive dogs showed arthritis in joints; dogs are stoic and often mask or hide moderate symptoms, especially if the pain is evenly spread over multiple joints and limping therefore doesn't help.It can also be difficult to rule out the possibility that some dogs have symptoms that might be related to other tick-borne diseases.
Since we don't know for sure if the chronic long-term symptoms sometimes associated with Lyme are caused by the disease itself or something else, and we can't be sure if symptoms in some vaccinated dogs are from the vaccination or something else, controversy will remain. Presumably most dogs being vaccinated live in areas where ticks are common, which means other tick-borne disease are common. So if your dog is vaccinated and then 4 months later is sick, it's easy to blame the vaccine, but was that really the problem? Or did they pick up something else?
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One other thing to consider: Many articles that say not to vaccinate stress that doxycycline is cheap and effective if your dog gets sick. But guess what? Doxy is the first line treatment for humans too. And we know that bacteria quickly evolve resistance to antibiotics. So do we really want to be dosing so many dogs with doxy, considering that rampant overuse of antibiotics is probably the single biggest looming health crisis we face?
My parents' dog had Lyme, and despite the insistence that it's mild in dogs, she was lame and would not eat. Yes the antibiotics fixed her, but she was a very unhappy doggy until she was treated.
And my former agility instructor's friend lost a dog to Lyme, so it can be serious.
I am open-minded and may change my position as more research becomes available, but for now we vaccinate every spring.
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I think your attitude is a very reasonable and balanced one.
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Permalink Reply by Lois B. Allen on
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Beth in the case of Lyme dogs are not a reservoir for the disease. Here in AL, it is probably deer so even though I agree that drug resistance is one of the most significant problems that exists in medicine today but people and dogs do not maintain Lyme in the population so their treatment is less likely to affect the reservoir in nature and/or contribute to transmission of resistance. We have created a horrible breeding ground for resistant organisms by treating our food animals with low levels of antibiotics!! If only we could undo that.
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Permalink Reply by Anna Morelli on
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So true about low level antibiotics. It's appalling what we've done to the food chain, including pesticides and GMOs plus feeding animals things they were never meant to eat.... All in the name of more abundant and cheaper food. The more we eat the sicker we get as a Society. Oh well, time to get off my soap box. I try to buy organic when I can and eat less.
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Infected dogs can in fact transmit Lyme to previously uninflected ticks, or so the research seems to say.
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Correct, if ticks get on any infected animals, they will be able to transmit it and it could get out of hand if there were several outside dogs that hadn't received tick preventatives, vaccines or testing. If they weren't really watched, they could get sick and be ripe food for new ticks. In general, we and our dogs get out and go into the areas where there are normal reservoirs and abundant ticks. My friend who just got Lyme has horses and they have several pastures and but they also have deers and other animals on their land so various Lyme infected animals pass through and the ticks with them. My friend and her husband fight ticks all of the time and obviously did not get enough off of themselves. She probably got the tick that got her by riding or working with the horses down in one of the pastures. UGH.
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Here's a more lengthy discussion of the withdrawal of the vaccine from the human market; it includes an explanation of the molecular mimicry that may cause arthritis in susceptible people who are exposed to Lyme, or possibly (but not definitively) to the vaccine. Since most of the dog sources I've read (including from vet schools) say the human vaccine was pulled due to safety concerns, I was surprised to find the real story was a bit more complicated.
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Thanks for this link - going now....
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Sometimes there is not just a right and a wrong..... There is risk in vaccinating and risk in not vaccinating and nobody can tell you where your individual dog will fall in the spectrum of those risks. So what to do? It may not be scientific, but life has taught me that, when unsure, trusting my own gut level of confidence in doing one thing versus the other works best for me and my own animals.
I chose not to vaccinate, but cannot recommend the same to you. In your shoes, I would go with the option you felt most comfortable with.
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