OK I just read and watched a little news snippet from www.KGET.com a news station in California. Heres the story - www.kget.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=a83f3660-50e3-4ecd-8bfc-dcff4c9ade1c
My opinion - The state veterinarian and the news story use a scare tactic to have you vaccinate your horse for West Nile. Because there has been a marked increase in the number of horses contracting the disease during the late summer months, you should vaccinate and there has been 9 cases, 4 in the last day. THEN in the exact same story the state vet says…
“To be honest, what we’re seeing is from previous years, we’re seeing a reduction in the number of cases that we’re seeing in horses.”
SO why the knee jerk reaction and urging people to vaccinate their horses. It does not make sense - horse sense that is! Do you realize how many horses are in California? 9 is a pretty pathetic number to be starting to worry about an epidemic and to have the state vet warn people. Now I realize that a person that owns one of these 9 horses would think a little differently as they are emotionally attached to the infected horse but considering the numbers for the general population this is a little over reaction. They also do not state in the story as to the outcome of these infected horses - did they die or did they pull through? Considering many of the infected horses will pull through over 60 to 70% in most cases, now we are not even talking that life threatening of a disease.
Anyway, if you really want to inform people about vaccinating for West Nile be sure to include that they need to use a vaccine that actually works! If you want to protect your horse from West Nile using a vaccine, you need to use either the recombinant DNA called Recombitek by Merial (www.equinewnv.com/) or the Chimera type PreveNile by Intervet (www.prevenile.com/). These two vaccines are the only two I would recommend for protecting your horse. Why? Because they work and they are less reactive to the general immune system…meaning less chance of causing allergies to flare up after vaccination and possibly less likely to create an allergic horse. The unfortunate thing is that I do not know if good quality duration studies have been done… meaning does the protection last longer than one year (knowing how the drug industry works based on past history we will not know anytime soon).
chimera, horse health, recombinant dna, west nile
Thats a pretty good catch there. I wonder if they are making any money from the sale of vacines.
The thought crossed my mind; however the state veterinarian usually does not have a general practice and sells no drugs or vaccines. I would also like to be respectful and maybe a little naive enough to think that the state veterinarians office is not corrupted by money from pharmaceutical companies, but money usually is at the root any conspiracy.
I do not know what the motivation is, but as I pointed out in the story it makes no sense.