Bruno's Blog – a complete animal at work

Now here’s a funny thing.

We know that epilepsy and seizures in pets are a big worry for pet owners, because we see what you are looking for when you visit our site at Vetscriptions.co.uk, we send out the information sheets as you request them and dispense the medicines that you order to treat your pets who have seizures.

Anyway, I was reading an article on epilepsy recently( as if I had nothing better to do at the end of a hard day).

I waded through the information on the various causes and their diagnosis. I then steeled myself for the section on treatment. These pieces have a tendency to be a pretty riveting read, as you might imagine. And I bravely circled the paragraphs on phenobarbitone  (the veterinary formulation is Epiphen) on Potassium bromide (Epilease, KBr etc), their side effects and how to monitor dosage and any complications.

Our scribe talked about some of the new and hideously expensive medicines available for the 20-40% of cases that do not respond to the above.

He then moved onto the ‘alternative therapies’: hypoallergenic diets and raw food feeding, acupuncture, vagal nerve stimulation (a fascinating treatment option if it really works) and finally….the placebo effect.

The placebo effect is where the patient feels there to have been an improvement in their symptoms when they have been given an otherwise ineffective treatment, such as a sugar pill instead of the appropriate medication. In human medicine it is well recognised but poorly understood, and is generally assumed to be down to the effect of the patients’ belief that they will get better when they take a medicine.

Now get this: a paper published recently in the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine has shown that a decrease in seizure activity was seen in more than half of the dogs given a placebo when compared with the pre-trial seizure frequency.

Almost 30% of these dogs underwent a 50% or greater reduction in seizure frequency when instead of anti-epileptic medication, they were given an ‘ineffective’ placebo.

Now I know that some of us like to imagine fondly that we might have healing hands, but does anyone have any suggestions as to what is going on here?

At a time when the years of loyal serice to the capital by Battersea Dogs Home are being celebrated by having a set of stamps issued in their honour, you can’t have avoided noticing that there is increasing debate about the future of the Dangerous Dogs Act.

I’m old enough to remember the start of the much-decried knee-jerk legislation. I worked in London at one of the RSPCA hospitals at the time and we certainly saw lots of Bull Terriers. Lovely dogs, almost all of them.

But we looked on in astonishment to find that it was no longer legal to keep a Dogo Argentino, a Fila Braziliera or a Japanese Tosa  in the UK.

What were we to do? How could we live in the ghastly new world order? Did anyone, anywhere in the UK have any idea what any of these dogs might look like?

So it was lunacy right from the start.

And now as then, the news is regularly littered with stories about children being savaged by Rottweilers.

‘I’ve got Rotties’ the vox pop man on the news bulletin said ‘ Lovely dogs. Big bears. But what were they doing leaving them with the kids?’

The question I might ask is what on earth is the point of having a dog that you can’t leave with children? Having a dog is meant to be fun, enjoyable and relaxing. It is meant to enhance your life, not add to the risks and put those that you know and love in mortal danger just because they looked at the dog the wrong way or pulled it’s tail in fun.

There are increasing calls for the law to be changed, and it’s about time.

Make it obligatory to microchip all dogs, and make the registered owner liable in every way for their dog’s behaviour, with serious punitive consequences for the owner for any infringement of a simple canine code of conduct.

It’s really not that difficult.

Why didn’t this hit the headlines before?

Back in 2003 a bunch of researchers at Nestle in Switzerland published a paper that showed that feeding probiotics, specifically Enterococcus faecium as found in all the Protexin range, Promax,  Norm-Prozorb and Avipro Plus can lead to higher levels of circulating vaccine-specific antibodies.

In real English, that means that giving a probiotic by mouth around and after the time of vaccination is likely to increase the animal’s response to the vaccine.

This is good news, and EVERYBODY SHOULD BE DOING IT!

A better response to a vaccine should in theory mean that you can then increase the interval between vaccines, which would also in our view be a very good thing.

At the clinic, we have been big users of probiotics for years – gut support at times of stress, whenever we use antibiotics and in all cases of diarrhoea.  These uses are fairly commonplace, but we had started using them at vaccination time a couple of years ago simply because we perceived that to be a time of physiological stress. Injecting modified disease-causing organisms into the body by an entirely unnatural route would seem to qualify as a stressful event, and therefore an appropriate time for additional support.

Now we know that we were right for another reason – more probiotics, higher levels of vaccine antibodies.

We also are keen on blood sampling for antibody levels before vaccination to check whether our patients actually need vaccinating or not, but maybe that’s another story..