#030 We were taught in vet school that “one size fits all” when it comes to vaccination: a Great Dane and a Chihuahua both get a 1 cc dose of the vaccine. There was some vague explanation that the “antigenic load” was all the mattered, and big animals and small ones needed the same amount of challenging substance injected.
This is what a past client was told recently when he asked for a smaller dose of rabies vaccine to be given to his 9 lb dog. His reaction (like mine should have been as a vet student) was “What the H? How does that make any sense at all?”
I immediately knew who to interview on this: Dr. John Robb of Protect the Pets, who observed early on in his practice that the smaller the pet, the more likely they were to have a negative reaction to a vaccine. In his work at a Banfield clinic, he also had access to a very large study that showed, in well over a million dogs, that he was far from the only one to observe this.
Join me and Dr. Robb as we discuss this reality that most of our profession refuses to come to grips with. We discuss how titers clearly demonstrate that immunity happens in the small pets with a lessened dose. Dr. Robb had to endure the long, lonely torment of his veterinary board for refusing to adhere to a standard dose that he knew would cause harm to his smaller patients.
For more information and links, be sure to visit the show notes for this episode at https://VitalAnimal.com/30