Inspired by the recent San Diego Safer Pet Vaccination Seminar, two anonymous dogs are making a $10,000 matching gift to The Rabies Challenge Fund. Through the month of April, they will match every dollar donated up to $10,000!
Please consider taking advantage of this generous gift to double the amount of a donation.
Tax-exempt donations can be mailed to The Rabies Challenge Fund, c/o Hemopet, 11561 Salinaz Avenue, Garden Grove, CA 92843. Credit card donations can be phoned in to Hemopet (specify they are for The Rabies Challenge Fund) by calling (714) 891-2022, ext. 13 or made with Paypal by following the instructions on our link http://www.rabieschallengefund.org/donate/donate-to-the-fund.
www.rabieschallengefund.org
I thought the best way to get across to all of you why the Rabies Challenge Fund is so important to pet owners would be to share stories about the pets affected by the Rabies vaccination and how it has effected their lives. The story I have chosen for is Louie's Story one that I have been following quite some time as I know his mom. This is only part of the reaction that he had to his routine mandatory vaccination. The changes to little Louie's body that have taken place due to his system wide reaction to the vaccination are horrible. It is Kris L. Kristine's teaming up with Dr. Dodds, and Dr. Schultz that are going to prevent this from needlessly happening to our pets.
The following has been taken from http://savelouie.blogspot.com/2009/07/part-5-rabies-vaccine-induced-ischemic.html
Thank you to Louie's mom for permission to reprint this blog post and her pictures.
I wanted to back up here for a moment and talk about the skin problems Louie has had. As I mentioned, at about the same time the pancreatitis and lymphangiectasia started, we were also seeing some very disturbing problems with Louie’s skin. We’d consulted an independent dermatologist who suspected an immune-mediated disease related to his most recent rabies vaccination, and indeed this was confirmed by the dermatologist who saw him at UC Davis.
The full name of this condition is rabies vaccine-induced ischemic dermatopathy, and it is one condition that can result from overvaccination with the rabies vaccine. I’ll be adding more information here over the coming weeks about this condition as well. You can see from the pictures of Louie to the right what the disease does; at the top is the crusting on his ear pinnae, which continued like this until much of the red area you see in the photo eroded away. Below that is a picture of the vaccine injection site many months, or perhaps a year or so, after the vaccine was administered. This photo actually shows the site after it had healed up quite a bit; at one time the entire darkened area was open and oozing. (Louie is a Chinese Crested, so he's hairless on most of his body. The hairlessness is just the way he is, but the blackheads and other lumps you can see on his legs in this picture are due to malnutrition from the intestinal disease.)
What has intrigued me about this disease in Louie's case is that it had its onset at the same time as the life-threatening intestinal problems. I have no idea whether there is a relationship between those problems and the rabies vaccination reaction, although it seems very clear that there is an immune-mediated component to both, as they both respond to the large doses of cyclosporine that Louie takes daily. I believe that much more research is needed in this area.
For more information about issues related to rabies vaccine, please see the Rabies Challenge Fund, and consider making a donation, if you can.