Rabies is a disease caused by a virus.  It is called a zoonotic disease, which means that it is transmittable from animals to people.

It has one of the highest case fatality rates of any disease; only one person has survived in recorded knowledge and it was a young girl a few years ago that was put into an induced coma for weeks to allow her brain to fight the disease.  She was too far into the disease for the post exposure injections and the induced coma was a long shot but it worked.  That one case should not lull any one into a false sense of security.

During 2010, there were 2 cases of human rabies and over 6000 cases of animal rabies which was an 8% increase from 2009.  I can’t find data on how many people had to have post exposure injections over the same time period.  Because rabies is endemic over the entire world (with the exception of Australia, Hawaii, Great Britain and a few other islands) it is not something that we can get rid of.  Bats carry it and they fly.  The vampire bat is a carrier in South America and because of the warming of the environment, the range of the vampire bat is extending northward.  In North America, we have our own bats that carry rabies as well as raccoons, skunks, foxes and other canids.

There are very few vaccines that legally can only be given by a veterinarian.  Rabies is one of those vaccines because of the zoonotic potential.  When there is a chance of people getting sick and dying, the government will get involved and that is why legally only veterinarians can give animals rabies vaccines.  I know that clients think that we are being anal when we insist that all healthy animals get vaccinated for rabies but it is a public health hazard and a legal requirement.    Also, if a wild animal bites a person, the animal must be tested for rabies and the only way to do this is to euthanized the animal and submit its brain for rabies testing.  If the animal cannot be caught then the person bitten has to go through the post exposure injections which can be quite painful. If a pet that is not vaccinated for rabies attacks a person, the same may be done to them.  Most of the time the dog or cat is quarantined for ten days by animal control.  Rarely, an in-home quarantine is allowed.    So you can see that there is a lot involved with this rabies thing.

So the next time we ask if your animal is current on its rabies vaccine, know that we are doing it for a good reason.  And when we insist on vaccinating your pet, we definitely have our reasons.

People think of fleas as annoying parasites but rarely do we think of them as carrying life threatening diseases.  The plague (Yersinia pestis) is spread by fleas and it can be fatal and in centuries gone by has been fatal to large numbers of people around the world.

The disease that is spread by fleas we see frequently here in cats is called feline infectious anemia.  The name of the infectious agent is Hemobartonella felis or Mycoplasma haemofelis.  It is not contagious to people but it can be fatal to cats.  The parasite attaches to the red blood cell causing the body to think that the red blood cell is a foreign particle.  The spleen in the body then “cleanses” the blood of these invading particles.  This causes an immune mediated anemia.  Jaundice (turning yellow) can occur and the anemia can be so serious as to require a blood transfusion for the cat to survive.

Treatment is successful in most cases if it is caught in time. The antibiotics doxycycline and enrofloxacin both rid the body of this blood parasite and prednisolone is given to stop the immune response of the body killing its own red blood cells. Of course, you have to get rid of the fleas as well by treating the cat and the environment.

I have seen this disease in the same cat a number of times (everytime it gets infested with fleas) and it never gets better without treatment.  So a cat that survives a bout of this disease should always be kept on flea control.  Cats that are feline leukemia positive seem to have a harder time clearing themselves of the parasite.  And there are two types of the parasite (the large form and the small form) and depending on your geographic location, one may be more virulent than the other.

So I know that there are worse things in the world that can happen to your cat but don’t think that fleas can’t kill your cat.  It really can be a serious problem. 

My staff recently showed me that we have had 3 bad Google reviews about our hospital.  I understand that bad reveiws are inevitable even if we do our best.  If an owner's pet is dying of cancer we can't change that but we can try to ease the pet's pain while still alive or ease the patient's passing.  It is very difficult for some people to handle these life and death issues and they may not understand what we are saying or do not like what we are trying to tell them.  These people will leave us and they will leave us unhappy but there is nothing we can do about it. 

What bothers me about the reviews is that they say we essentially enjoy euthanasias.  After reading these reviews I had to question myself and asked one of our long time receptionists if she felt we were too easy to euthanise animals.  She immediately said no and that the reason she was proud to say she worked for us was that all the doctors always acted on the behalf of the patient and always did what was right for the patient and owner.  

What she said got me thinking.  The goal of people that work for veterinarians is to work for a veterinarian that treats it's patients with caring and respect and does everything they can to ensure their patients welfare.  These people will not stay long at a facility that does not care about it's patients and euthanizes animals for no good reason.  Although people leave a job for many reasons, most of our staff has been with us for more than five years and some for as many as 10 years.  If we are too quck to euthanize and are not respectful to our patients, the staff would be the first to know and it would be hard for us to keep good people.

I did place a response to the Google reviews and if you want to read what has been said and my reply just do a Google search for Kindness Animal Hospital, Port St. Lucie and look for reviews of our hospital (I tried to put a link in here but it didn't work).