re lyme vaccine kathleen richards kilty ucrengr wrote my nearly year old pomeranian had a nasty reaction to this vaccination suffice it to say we will not vaccinate her for lyme disease again she s been camping through some states and has backpacked with us as well and we are used to watching for ticks and dealing with them and we simply won t take her to really active lyme disease areas not to drag this out anymore but many veterinarians feel that lyme disease in dogs is so easy to treat that in an endemic area they often just give the appropriate antibiotics to dogs presenting with lameness swollen joints fever a recent paper march has finally established that lyme disease in dogs can be reproduced in a controlled experimentaly setting this has been an ellusive matter for researchers and is one of the fundamental requirements for many to acknowledge an agent as being causitive of a particular disease up to now only the vaccine manufacturer has been able to prove that the disease exists this paper is noteworthy in two other regards none of the animals they infected were treated in any way the dogs had episodes of lameness during a week period which occurred months after exposure after this period none showed any further clinical signs up to the month observation period of the study so these are proven clinically sick lyme patients showing spontaneous recovery without the benefit of drug treatment of course observations longer than months will be necessary to be sure the disease doesn t have the same chronicity that some see in humans the addendum to the paper calls into question the techniques used by the vaccine manufacturer to validate the vaccine of course they want the world to use the model they developed in order to test vaccine efficacy anyway maybe we will see some independent scientifically sound evaluations of this vaccine in the next year or so jeff parke jeffp pgavin vetmed wsu edu also jeffp wsuvm bitnet aol jeffparke washington state university college of veterinary medicine class of pullman wa
