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..