More dog owners are questioning vaccines like rabies after COVID

More than half of U.S. dog owners expressed concerns about vaccinating their dogs, including against rabies, according to a new study published Saturday in the journal Vaccine. The study comes as anti-vaccine sentiments among humans have exploded in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pets are now often considered to be a member of the family, and their health-care decisions are weighed with the same gravity. But the consequences of not vaccinating animals can be just as dire as humans. Dogs, for example, are responsible for 99% of rabies cases globally. Rabies, which is often transmitted via a bite, is almost always fatal for animals and people once clinical signs appear. A drop in rabies vaccination could constitute a serious public health threat.

In the new study, the authors surveyed 2,200 people and found 53% had some concern about the safety, efficacy or necessity of canine vaccines. Nearly 40% were concerned that vaccines could cause dogs to develop autism, a theory without any scientific merit.

TheBlue22,

If you don’t vaccinate your pet, you should be disallowed from owning it

DragonTypeWyvern, (edited )

And then they should be spayed or neutered, for responsible population control.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

People who don’t spay or neuter their pets piss me off. We don’t need more dogs in the world. More dogs means more of them suffer through neglect and abuse. We need fewer dogs and better owners.

CaptainAlcohol,

True for any pet…I lost count of how many kittens are impossible to save because they grew as strays. So many of them. I try to do something and I feel like sh1t after seeing how many of those attempts failed, it’s depressing and i am a tad too sensitive for this. Neuter your pet please, I don’t want to see any more neglected pets…

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

I think it might even be more true for cats than for dogs. I’ve seen a lot more stray cats than stray dogs anyway.

Adulated_Aspersion,

I believe you mean to spay or neuter the animal, right? Not the pet, but the animal who prevented the pet from receiving the vaccine.

Guy_Fieris_Hair,

That is literally the law where I am, an most cities I thought. Dogs are required to have a rabies vaccine.

dogslayeggs,

That is only enforced if you register your dog with the city. It’s required by law to register your pet and pay a yearly fee, plus show vaccination records. But it is only enforced if the police stop you for some reason while you are with your dog and they happen to ask about your dog’s registration. If you only walk you dog on leash and never take it anywhere that a cop might talk to you, nobody would ever know your dog wasn’t registered. If you never take your dog to daycare while you are on vacation, nobody would ever know your dog didn’t have vaccinations.

LaunchesKayaks,
@LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world avatar

The local dog warden will do rounds in neighborhoods in my area to check for dog registrations and rabies tags

alienanimals,

Dog owners too dumb to pick up after their own dog’s poop wonder if they even need to take their dog to the vet.

SocialMediaRefugee,

We are starting to regress to a pre Louis Pasteur point now

CaptainAlcohol,

Relevant part:

Pets are now often considered to be a member of the family, and their health-care decisions are weighed with the same gravity. But the consequences of not vaccinating animals can be just as dire as humans. Dogs, for example, are responsible for 99% of rabies cases globally. Rabies, which is often transmitted via a bite, is almost always fatal for animals and people once clinical signs appear. A drop in rabies vaccination could constitute a serious public health threat

At some point it becomes a matter of public health and safety.

blue_zephyr,

Imagine dying a slow and horrible death because Karen didn’t trust the rabies vaccine.

CosmicTurtle,

Imagine? It’s fucking happened! Many Karens have died in hospital with ventilators, begging for paxlovid but it was too late.

The surviving Karens then say “See, it wasn’t so bad” or “COVID isn’t real.”

prole,

Fucking infuriating.

To everyone who’s ever said, “oh, it’s just harmless fun,” in reference to any kind of pseudoscience: here is just one more example of what normalizing that type of magical thinking can do.

seejur,

The shape of the Venn diagram about people who don’t vaccinate their dogs, and people who keep their dogs off leash is a circle

Neon_Dystopia,

I’m fine with Karens dying from their own stupidity just don’t make it anyone else’s problem.

isVeryLoud,

???

JustZ, (edited )

Oh these dumb assholes.

Shakespeare on it:

“All the contagion of the south light on you. You shames of Rome! You herd of boils and plague. [Let us] plaster you o’er, that you may be abhorr’d! Go, further than seen, and one infect another, against the wind another mile!”

This was about plague and dirty people that wouldn’t stop dumping their shit in the gutter in front of their houses. He says you dirty fucks, herd of plague, were going to post picture of you on the wall and make fun of you. You should leave town, and then go another mile away, and infect each other.

Savage.

Dem_Bo_Sain,

I agree with your sentiment, but the quote is from Corolanius. Marcius (a Roman general) is cursing his own men for retreating from an assault upon an enemy city. He’s very upset.

JustZ,

Hmmm, no doubt you’re correct now that I read it in context. I can’t place exactly where I got this notion from and my Google fu is not finding it. It was a piece online somewhere about Shakespearean concepts as to the lives of commoners in his time, including plague, through his works.

solstice,

I can precisely follow the Stupid Logic and I hate it.

twistypencil,

Know the common carrier of rabies in your area.

Burninator05,

…is almost always fatal for animals and people…

That’s an understatement. I think there are only one or two documented cases ever where someone started to show symptoms of rabies and lived. If I recall correctly those who did live were given massive doses of the vaccine as the moment symptoms were noticed and were mentally incapacitated the rest of their lives.

RedAggroBest,

Not quite, the vaccine is only part of it. The Milwaukee Protocol involves putting the patient into a coma and dropping their body temp so low that the virus can’t spread (should note that low core temps are why marsupials like opossums are damn near immune) because once symptoms are showing it’s actively turning your brain to mush. Between the virus already being present and the coma, brain damage is basically guaranteed despite survival.

Iirc only 29 people recorded as surviving. We should note that rabies has a written record going back to the start of writing. 29, in 4 millennia.

Rabies is scary as fuck y’all. You can get this shit from getting an organ transplant from someone who never knew they were infected after being bitten by a bat while camping last year.

youtu.be/kxBIJvNHZg4?si=2MjzGA2caKFIcBcM here’s a video that’s pretty disturbing if you’re wanting to see what dying of rabies looks like. Spoilers, it’s awful.

ech,

There’s also a lot of disagreement on if the Milwaukee Protocol works or if it’s something else entirely that we’re just starting to figure out, and if it’s worth the risks of things like lock-in syndrome if it won’t do anything helpful for most people. Radiolab has a pretty interesting episode about it all

Pregnenolone,

You can get this shit from getting an organ transplant from someone who never knew they were infected after being bitten by a bat while camping last year.

Reminds me of my favourite episode of Scrubs

Kalkaline,
@Kalkaline@programming.dev avatar

Rabies should just be considered 100% deadly. There are edge cases where the healthcare community has some guesses as to why the patient survived, but the absolute sure way to survive is to get vaccinated ASAP after exposure.

twistypencil,

There is radiolab episode about this, highly recommended. A girl survived who was bitten on her toe by inducing a coma and giving her the vaccine. The idea was that slowed the death march of the rabies to the brain and allowed the body enough time to mount a defense. The treatment had not had a very good success rate.

m4xie,

The article does not link the study. It can be found linked from the authors site (www.mattmotta.com/publications) here: osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qmbkv/

Honestly, it’s more worth reading than the article. It’s 7 pages, not including references and data.

I was wondering who the 2,200 people were. From the study:

Data

Data for this study are derived from a nationally representative online survey of N = 2,200 US adults, conducted between March 30 - April 10, 2023. We administered this study in partnership with YouGov…

…YouGov did this for our study by first pulling a simple random sample of responses from nationally representative US Census data, …These individuals were then invited to participate in our study.

The firm then corrected for any remaining deviations … on the basis of respondents’ racial identity, gender identity, age, educational attainment, and 2020 US Presidential vote choice.

Stage 1 Results: The Prevalence and Politicization of CVH

We begin our analysis by considering the prevalence of CVH among dog owners. As Table 3 demonstrates, a large minority of dog owners consider vaccines administered to dogs to be unsafe (37%), ineffective (22%), and/or unnecessary (30%). Correspondingly, we find that a slight majority of dog owners (53%) can be considered to be vaccine hesitant; i.e., because they endorse at least one of these three positions (see: Measures)

breadsmasher,
@breadsmasher@lemmy.world avatar

US adults

Can you please start educating your country

theodewere, (edited )
@theodewere@kbin.social avatar

someone has to make the loud ones sit down and shut up first

m4xie,

My country? I’m Canadian.

Granted, we’re ten years behind the US at most.

lolcatnip,

You can’t make someone learn when they’re determined to remain ignorant. So no.

Staccato,

Problem is our country tells each of our 50 states to do the education thing… so that leads to a huge range of outcomes for the unlucky students born into the wrong state.

Rapidcreek,

On the plus side, some of those owners are bound to be bitten.

Ertebolle,

Sure, but with the much bigger minus that rabid dogs are also likely to bite a lot of perfectly innocent people, particularly kids, and even more particularly, kids who have crazy anti-vaxxer parents that might not get them a (human) rabies shot in time to save their life after a dog bite.

(note how many kids die of self-inflected gunshot wounds because their parents are too stupid to keep them safe from those)

Rapidcreek,

As a kid I remember a rabid dog confronting me in an alley. A cop showed up an shot him dead. You might think I would be traumatized, but actually thought it was kind of cool.

bernieecclestoned,

Updates on Rabies virus disease: is evolution toward “Zombie virus” a tangible threat?

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7975959/

The irony of brain dead anti vaxxers becoming zombies

uphillbothways,
@uphillbothways@kbin.social avatar

Any evolution or opportunity for it through any spread, especially in human adjacent vectors, is super bad news. A respiratory communicable rabies would be a potential "doomsday virus". We really don't want rabies picking up any new tricks.

Rocketpoweredgorilla,
@Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca avatar

I mean… they kinda already are.

Hotdogman,

28 days later…

lolcatnip,

Not enough.

Alto,
@Alto@kbin.social avatar

Killing your dog to own the libs

Bizarroland,
@Bizarroland@kbin.social avatar

I give it 7 years before we hear a story about a rash of children getting rabies and dying probably somewhere in the southeast or Midwest from a rabies outbreak.

JustZ,

Florida.

Missjdub,

I pay $10 a year to license my dog. My dog has to be rabies vaccinated to get his license. He’s issued a tag with an ID#. The vet has to report his vaccine info. I get a certificate with a vaccine number too. I suppose I’m fortunate to live in an area with this as a requirement but I think it’s pretty easy to get around this too. I live in a metro area. I suppose in more rural areas, licensing and registration of dogs isn’t the norm.

cmbabul,

This would be decried as authoritarianism in many part of the US

JustZ,

That’s true I think in most of America but it’s voluntary, basically. You’re supposed to do it but there is no enforcement until your dog gets loose or bites someone and someone asked about your license.

AnonTwo, (edited )

I never watched it and even I know about Old Yeller. This is just animal cruelty with how well known the disease is.

edit: Also isn't Rabies also a disease that targets the brain? Like the mother of all trades. Autism or Rabies /s (and yes I know one of those wouldn't even happen)

MegaUltraChicken,

Rabies doesn’t just “target” the brain. It fucking nukes that shit. Untreated rabies is one of the scariest diseases that exists. Once you’re feeling symptoms, you are 99% fucked to a slow incredibly awful death.

ech,

More like 99.99999999999999999999999999999…well, you get the point. In all of human history, there have only been a handful of confirmed survivors of rabies. It’s the most lethal disease known to man.

3laws,

As an autistic, a dog lover and a science guy… I feel so fucking conflicted.

Like, statistically speaking dogs are more likely to bite their owners, making rabies lethal for both the dog and the common sense challenged owners; I’m willing to let the humans die, however the dog is still innocent.

Anyway, I just wish every single conspiracy theorist anti vaccine person gets a very treatable and preventable (via vaccine) disease+infection; no sympathy from me.

Xyzipper,

I’m not. As much as I have no sympathy for shitty dog owners, chances are shitty dog owners are gonna keep from doing anything enough that someone innocent may get bit and unknowingly get rabies. That and shitty dog owners seem likely to simply lie about having given a rabies vaccine to their puppers. Literally I want anything and everything to help prevent innocent people (and other dogs) from getting rabies. It’s so fucking awful. Even if that includes saving some people from leaving the gene pool that might not deserve to be there.

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