What You Should Know About The Kennel Cough Vaccine
Bordetella,
also known as kennel cough, is a vaccine that’s been required by
groomers, boarding kennels, training facilities and veterinary hospitals
for years. It’s become a routine requirement for any dog that spends
time with other dogs (which is nearly all dogs).
The
fact that a vaccine exists is surprising in itself. Kennel cough is
almost always a self limiting disease that’s about as dangerous to your
dog as the common cold is to you. So it’s not really much of a problem
for your dog … but it can be a problem for any facility that has a case
of kennel cough go through it.
Or at least they think it is. I’ll get to that part in a bit.
When
kennel cough hits a daycare or boarding kennel and a lot of dogs are
affected, they have to shut down for a few days so other dogs coming to
the facility don’t catch it. When our children get colds, we keep them
at home and give them some chicken soup – that’s just common sense. But
if our dogs catch a cold, we’ve been led to think that they’re carrying a
dangerous and highly contagious disease.
So we vaccinate our dogs so they don’t catch kennel cough.
But there are three pretty significant problems with this thinking:
Problem 1: the vaccine doesn’t work all that well
Just
like we’ll probably never find a cure for the common cold, we haven’t
found a cure for the dog’s common cold. Here’s the reason why the
common intranasal kennel cough vaccine isn’t a terribly good idea:
There are at least forty agents that cause bordetella …
But only a couple of these agents are contained in the vaccine.
This
makes the bordetella vaccine a complete shot in the dark. In fact, the
odds of the vaccine working are so long, that noted veterinary
immunologist Dr Ronald Schultz concludes …
“Kennel Cough is not a vaccinatable disease.”
Hardly
a ringing endorsement from the most qualified veterinary immunologist
in the world. But despite this, vets still vaccinate a staggering number
of dogs for this simple problem every day.
Maybe
they do this because they figure that there’s a small chance the
vaccine will indeed work – and the vaccine is just an intranasal spray,
so it’s pretty safe, right?
Well, that leads us to the next problem …
Problem 2: the vaccine is not safe
Most
vaccines these days are something called modified live vaccines. It’s
been shown that the “modified” viruses in human vaccines embed
themselves in the genes of the host and can shuffle around and
reactivate thirty or more years after vaccination.
Here’s an example …
Chicken
pox is another common and self limiting disease that we now regularly
vaccinate children for. Because of mass vaccination, children and adults
no longer receive the natural boost to their immune system they would
normally receive from benign childhood diseases like chicken pox. So the
result of mass vaccination for chicken pox is a much higher incidence
of its evil cousin, shingles, which carries more serious complications
than chicken pox.
So
when your dog gets the injectable form of the kennel cough vaccine,
this happens (and they also get some other stuff injected with the
vaccine like MSG, aluminum, formaldehyde and foreign animal proteins).
Although the intranasal vaccine has fewer of those dangerous ingredients
than the injectable one, there are still dangers with it. According to
Patricia Jordan DVM, bacterial vaccines like bordetella are
also capable of lurking in the genetic makeup, waiting to replicate
and awaken as a disease that could be a hundred times as dangerous as
kennel cough.
Vaccination of any sort also elevates histamine, which we all know can promote cancer and chronic inflammation.
But aside from the dangers of the vaccine, here’s another interesting fact …
Problem 3: somebody did some bad math
Here’s a little known fact: vaccinated dogs shed the disease they were vaccinated against into the environment.
Dogs that are vaccinated for kennel cough will shed that disease for up to 7 weeks and parainfluenza for a week (I should probably mention that a lot of the bordetella vaccines also include influenza).
Think about that for a minute …
If
the point of bordetella vaccination is to reduce the risk of dogs
getting kennel cough, then isn’t it backwards thinking to have your dog
walking around, spreading bordetella to all the other dogs he comes in
contact with?
Let’s look at two different scenarios.
Scenario 1:
Let’s say a daycare has 50 dogs attending daily. They don’t require the
kennel cough vaccine but one day a dog walks in with kennel cough. So
they’ve got one dog walking around, spreading kennel cough to other
dogs. But that one dog is pretty easy to identify – he’s sneezing, he’s
hacking and the smart daycare provider will kindly isolate him for the
day and ask his owners to keep him home for a few more days.
How many other dogs in the daycare would catch his kennel cough? Probably a few.
So it makes sense to vaccinate so this doesn’t happen, right?
Well, not exactly. Here’s how that scenario would play out.
Scenario 2:
The same daycare has 50 dogs attending daily but the difference is they
require their dogs to have the kennel cough vaccine. If this vaccine is
given yearly (and it’s often given twice a year), that means that 50
times a year – virtually every week – there will be a vaccinated dog in
daycare shedding kennel cough … for 7 weeks at a stretch.
So
instead of the occasional dog coming in and spreading kennel cough,
you’ve now got dogs walking around every single day, shedding kennel
cough AND influenza.
And
here’s the worst part … now the daycare providers can’t identify the
dog who might be spreading kennel cough. The vaccinated dogs spreading
kennel cough (and don’t forget influenza) won’t show any symptoms of
kennel cough so they’re free to interact with all the dogs in daycare
and spread bordetella all over the joint.
And
now we’ve got a real hot mess on our hands because the vaccine has a
really crappy track record when it comes to actually protecting dogs.
Does kennel cough vaccination still sound like a good idea to you?
If so, then maybe a recap is in order …
We’re led to believe kennel cough is a dangerous disease, but in the vast majority of cases, it’s just a common cold.
We know the vaccines aren’t really effective and the world’s leading vaccine researcher says that kennel cough isn’t even a vaccinatable disease.
We ignore this and vaccinate for it anyway for some reason … and what
we do know with 100% certainty is that vaccines contain dangerous
ingredients and can also cause a serious anaphylactoid reaction. Look up anaphylactoid … I guarantee you won’t like it.
And here’s some irony for you that I didn’t mention …
The kennel cough vaccine can cause, well, kennel cough!
