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Dog Vaccinations - where to now?

What is duration of immunity?

When we vaccinate your pet, we recommend a booster to be given at some point in the future to ensure adequate continued immunity. This duration of immunity is based on clinical trials where a vaccinated animal successfully resists a challenge with the disease after however many months. These trials are expensive and do pose some questions regarding animal welfare, however they leave us with firm evidence on which to base our decision for a suitable time period between vaccinations. We need to be convinced that the protocol we advise you to follow will in fact provide the level of protection we expect, otherwise we are doing both the animal and owner a disservice! Our new protocol is to vaccinate dogs every 3 years with the ‘5 in 1’, and only give Parainfluenza/Lepto annually in the intermediate years. (Please see our protocol below for specifics) These two need to be given more frequently as they are not ‘live’ vaccinations and do not provide as long a duration of immunity as parvo, distemper and infectious canine hepatitis.

There is also increasing evidence that a single booster given to a dog with ‘lapsed’ vaccines will provide adequate immunity in many cases – however due to licensing laws on prescription only medicines we are ‘obligated’ to follow the data sheets which will often recommend a full course of vaccines again. At our practice we treat each case individually – and I would be more than happy to offer an opinion on any examples you may want to discuss.

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