Spotlight: Animal Health - Parvo / vaccines

Now that Christmas is over, it is time to start thinking about any vaccines those new Christmas puppies and kittens need. Not only do the young animals need vaccines - those adults need boosters, too, in order to stay protected.  
Parvo is going to be our main subject, but please remember that rabies and the other vaccines are also very important.
Parvo specifically is one of the major viruses that we are vaccinating against in dogs. It is a highly contagious virus that primarily affects unvaccinated young dogs.  
Unvaccinated puppies are the most susceptible and the most likely to be severely affected. Parvovirus causes a range of symptoms including, but not limited to: lethargy, loss of appetite, abdominal pain and bloating, fever or even possibly a low body temperature (hypothermia), vomiting, and severe, often bloody, diarrhea.
Persistent vomiting and diarrhea is the most typical presentation - this can cause rapid dehydration and the damage to the intestines and immune system can cause septic shock.  
This is a deadly disease, especially when left untreated. Most deaths occur within 48 to 72 hours of showing clinical signs.
With early and aggressive supportive care, parvo puppies can do very well. Any time a puppy, especially one that has been minimally vaccinated, comes to us for vomiting and diarrhea, we treat them as a parvo puppy until proven otherwise.  
Since this virus is so highly contagious, we may require these puppies to stay in the car until after they have been tested and we even want to keep owners out of the building. Parvo is spread by anything that has been contaminated with feces or vomit from an infected animal - meaning that it can easily travel on shoes, clothing, fur, and other objects.  
So, don’t be offended if we are trying to keep you out of the building if your puppy is suspicious. We want to minimize contamination of our building/property to protect other animals.  
Parvovirus is diagnosed primarily on history, clinical signs, and a fecal parvo test that we can run at the clinic. The test only takes about 10 minutes, so we get an answer very quickly on how concerned we should be about parvo.  With a positive test, we move on to aggressive supportive care.  Unfortunately, since parvo is a virus, there is not a specific medication that we can give to get rid of it.  All we can do is support the puppy until the body’s immune system is able to fight off the virus.  Unfortunately, sometimes even with aggressive treatment the virus can be too much for the puppy to fight off.
Getting started on vaccines and getting the proper boosters is one of the most important things that we can do to protect our pets. Puppies and kittens sometimes have their vaccines started before 7-8 weeks of age, but this is the typical age that we see them at the clinic for their first visits.  
During that first visit, we can come up with a plan - puppies and kittens receive booster combination vaccines until they reach at least 16-20 weeks of age to ensure that they receive the proper immune response.  Immunity provided by the mother can interfere with some of the initial vaccines, but the length of that initial immunity varies a lot between individuals.  Due to this, it is important that there are multiple boosters.
So, what is the moral of the story? Prevention! Prevention! Prevention!  
Parvovirus and many other diseases have vaccines that can easily prevent or at least minimize the severity of the virus.  As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure - quite literally.  It is much less expensive and easier on the pet to prevent these diseases than it is to treat the illness.  
If you have a pet that needs vaccines and you aren’t sure where to start - call us and we would be happy to help. We prefer seeing healthy animals so that we can prevent disease.