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Vaccinations podcast-mosquito born illness
Hi Doc T
I have been listening to a lot of your podcasts and I wondered about vaccination for mosquito born illness-good idea? Also here in Canada rabies is still annually for horses but every 3 years for dogs. I’m wondering about frequency for rabies for horses in the US and tetanus while we’re at it. Thanks
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1 Reply
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There are several vector borne diseases and luckily for you in Canada, the bugs and mosquitos are being chilled out. Vaccination for these diseases would then be in the late spring to give protection when they fly.
The encephalitis diseases (Eastern, Western, Venezuelan and West Nile) are diseases carried by the mosquito. These can affect horses even in a “closed herd” and therefore are considered in the “core” vaccines according to the AAEP. In addition, these diseases can kill your horses. Therefore I think that these effective vaccinations along with tetanus and rabies vaccines should be given to all horses.
Other diseases that can make your horses sick but can be effectively dealt with through great management include the influenza, rhinopnumonitis (EHV or equine herpes virus), strangles, Potomac horse fever, anthrax and botulism. This include isolation of horses that come and go on the farm (an “open” herd),
The rabies vaccine was licensed for annual use in horses. There may be 2 reasons why it has not been licensed for every 3 years. The first is that it was easier to license for annual and may be too costly to change this. The second may be due to the inability to substantially determine if the horse is protected beyond a year. IgG titers often go very low quickly yet the memory cells are ready to return when an infection occurs. If you can’t measure the degree of protection in a post vaccinated horse then the only other way to determine if the horse is protected is to expose it to rabies and see if the horse lives or dies. You can see the problem with this.
Rabies will kill your horse and may also kill you if you don’t realize that your colicing horse (the #1 sign of rabies in a horse) actually has rabies. I have been “attacked” by a horse with rabies (confirmed by autopsy) and went through the post exposure protocol. I would never recommend modifying the annual rabies vaccination. It is not a disease to mess with – 100% lethal to ALL mammals and contagious from the horse to humans.
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