Pet threat
Regarding the anti-vaxxers movement [FT384:12-13], I’d like to relate my alarming recent experience of its impact on pets. Over the past two years, we’ve been looking into re-homing kittens. The last time we did this was 13 years ago, when the experience was much more straightforward. However, this time we have had no fewer than five desperately ill kittens in our ‘quarantine’ room over the past 18 months, acquired, variously, from very large and well known charities, small private charities and a highly recommended private breeder. All of them had to go back to their original homes because we have older, healthy cats that we were unwilling to expose to communicable diseases.
We had our vets run tests on them. It’s not exhaustive research by a long way, but it’s a reasonable random sample frame. The
poor things were suffering from, variously, herpesvirus (cat ‘flu), calicivirus (another respiratory illness that causes painful ulceration of the tongue and eyes), and giardia (an intestinal parasite). The first two viruses are in the routine innoculations that vets recommend are given at roughly eight weeks and then a booster at 12 weeks, and thereafter annually. These routine vaccinations also protect against panleukopenia, which kills off white blood cells (closely related to dog parvovirus), FeLV (feline leukemia) and FIV (the cat version of HIV).
Kittens are particularly sensitive to any communicable disease; but if they and their cattery mates had been fully vaccinated, it’s highly unlikely that they would have developed any of these illnesses, certainly not to the extent of displaying the clinical signs – for example breathing difficulties, fever and lethargy – that we witnessed. These unprotected cats risk dangerous secondary infections (which two of these already had: namely mycoplasma felis), losing an eye to cat ‘flu and continually ‘shedding’ the virus in future as a carrier, not to mention a compromised immune system for life.
Our vets confirmed that they had indeed seen a rise in the instances of these preventable illnesses over the last few years. Yet one member of the public that I spoke to when enquiring about a private kitten sale elaborated on the demonstrable lack of the words ‘fully vaccinated’ in about 90% of adverts. When I asked if her 11-month-old kittens had received their first vaccinations, she replied: “No, I don’t believe in giving little kittens a small bit of a deadly disease. Did you know that’s what they do?”
Jo Harlow
Ditton, Kent