What Do We Vaccinate Dogs For?

These diseases can make your pet very ill, and are often fatal even with treatment. Vaccination is the only reliable prevention.

There are 4 different diseases that we vaccinate dogs against. These diseases can make your pet very ill, potentially requiring days to weeks of hospitalisation. Once your pet is infected, most of these diseases tend to be fatal even with the best care available. Making it even worse, they are highly contagious – it takes only a very small amount of exposure to the disease for your pet to get sick. Luckily, keeping your pet up to date with their vaccinations provides very effective protection against these diseases. Read on for more information about the different diseases we vaccinate against!

Parvovirus

This virus is highly contagious, and can survive in the environment for months – unvaccinated pets can get sick without ever seeing another dog. It causes lethargy, pain, loss of appetite, severe vomiting and diarrhoea containing blood. Treatment is supportive, including hospitalisation on a drip, antibiotics, and pain relief. Death can occur quickly.

Distemper

A highly contagious disease, which causes a wide variety of symptoms, ranging from runny noses and coughing, to pneumonia, fever, diarrhoea, skin disease, paralysis and seizures. Your pet does not have to come into contact with another dog to catch this disease – other animals such as foxes can carry the disease, and it can be spread through the air, or through contact with areas or items that infected animals have been also in contact with. There is NO TREATMENT available, except for keeping them hydrated in hospital with a fluid drip and hoping their immune system will get them through. The very occasional dog that does survive the disease often has to be euthanised anyway due to the debilitating brain damage they are left with. We treated a puppy here at Hampton Park Veterinary Hospital last year with this disease. Devastatingly, we couldn’t save the puppy. It makes it all the worse knowing that if the prior owner had kept up to date with vaccinations this wouldn’t have happened.

Hepatitis

Symptoms range from fever, vomiting, diarrhoea, and bleeding through to sudden death. There is no effective treatment, and most dogs that become sick from this disease end up dying from it.

Canine Cough

This disease is highly contagious, and has a bacterial and viral cause. It causes mild to severe coughing, and while most animals remain otherwise well, dogs that are very young, very old, or sick can require hospital stays to help them recover.

Other Diseases

There are other diseases with vaccines available, such as leptospirosis and rabies. However as these diseases are not found in this area, we do not routinely vaccinate against this diseases. If your pet is going on holiday with you, particularly if they’re going overseas, give us a call to talk about what other protection your pet may need to keep them safe.

Dogs require vaccination once a year to keep their immunity against these diseases high. If your pet has missed a vaccination, be sure to give us a call to get them booked in as soon as possible! If your adult pet’s last vaccination was two or more years ago, or if they’ve never been vaccinated this is particularly important.