Eve and Tibbers have not been vaccinated against rabies. They live with human Susie Lux and her husband near the base of California's Mount Shasta, where bears, raccoons, foxes, and opossums roam.
Eve, the lab, is by Lux's side “24/7,” while Tibbers, the cat, lives both indoors and outdoors and is “exposed to everything, but we've lived here all our lives.” But I've never had a problem.”
Decades ago, Lacks, 64, said one of her dogs had a severe reaction after receiving a rabies vaccine. She then decided to refrain from vaccinating her animals, including for rabies, which is required by California law without a waiver.
Rising vaccine hesitancy and declining vaccine uptake have some researchers worried that this could have a knock-on effect with owners forgoing rabies vaccinations for their cats and dogs.
There is scant data on how widespread the decision not to vaccinate pets against rabies is. However, a small but growing number of surveys of pet owners suggest a link between these attitudes and gunshot avoidance. Public health experts and veterinarians are concerned about the potential for an increase in cases of rabies, a vaccine-preventable disease, in both pets and humans.
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“We know we live in a world where rabies transmission is relatively low,” says Matthew Motta, assistant professor of health law, policy, and management at Boston University. “But we're very concerned about a world where that doesn't become a reality, and the way we get there is through vaccine hesitancy.”
Very few people die from rabies in the United States, a trend that has remained fairly consistent since the 1960s, and this is no coincidence, said Dr. Rodney Rohde, Regents Professor and Global Fellow at Texas State University.
“It really ties in with the dog and cat vaccine programs that have been so successful over the past 50 years, and to a lesser extent livestock,” Rohde said.
According to the World Health Organization, 59,000 people die from rabies each year worldwide, mostly in Asia and Africa. Young children account for an estimated 40 percent of those deaths, and unvaccinated dogs are most commonly associated with these deaths overall.
According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, five people in the United States will be infected with rabies in 2021, and once the disease develops, it is almost certainly fatal. The association reported that more than 3,600 animals were confirmed to have rabies that year, an 18 percent decrease from the previous year, when nearly 4,500 rabid animals were reported. The main sources of these confirmed cases were bats, raccoons, and skunks; dogs, cats, and cattle were rarely associated with rabies.
Chart by Megan McGrew/PBS NewsHour
Matthew Motta explores whether there is a link between anti-vaccination attitudes in humans and withholding of rabies vaccines for pets after speaking with his sister Gabriela Motta, a veterinarian in suburban Philadelphia. I became interested in it. Together, they co-created and launched a survey with YouGov of a nationally representative sample of 2,200 U.S. adults, including pet owners, and published the results in Vaccines last August.
In trying to gauge vaccine hesitancy in dogs, the authors found that 37% of dog owners thought vaccines were unsafe for their pets, 22% thought vaccines were ineffective, and 20% thought vaccines were unnecessary. I discovered what I was thinking. The authors acknowledged that the study was incomplete (responses were self-reported and could be influenced by bias), but the study “results in dog vaccination hesitancy and its public health implications. “This is an important first step in understanding the impact,” he added.
Although researchers had encountered dog vaccine hesitancy through anecdotal experience, this study “explains just how prevalent this phenomenon is; Motta told PBS NewsHour that the researchers were surprised by the results, suggesting “maybe they're showing hesitance.”
Motta said the coronavirus pandemic has “transformed” the way people think about vaccines. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research, said in recent years that vaccine misinformation has spiraled into a “now vaccine revolution,” with a combination of defiance and loss of trust undermining public safety and health concerns. He said that And policy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that fewer than 1 in 5 Americans have received the latest coronavirus vaccine, leading people to rely on misinformation to validate their choices. . Social psychologist Sander van der Linden, director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab at the University of Cambridge, said misinformation “plays a huge role in vaccine hesitancy and how much people trust institutions and the media.” “We are fulfilling our goals.”
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Matthew Motta said an analysis of survey data found that if people had a negative view of one vaccine, they were more likely to view all vaccines negatively. Additionally, people who are more resistant to dog vaccines are “less likely to think vaccination should be mandatory,” he said.
The findings, published in the journal Vaccine, reflect what researchers are beginning to discover elsewhere. In November, various researchers published another study in the same journal that surveyed nearly 4,000 respondents in the United States and found that “human and pet vaccine hesitancy attitude scales are reciprocal. It was found that they are closely related. Motta said he hopes to continue asking these research questions for years to come to study the relationship between vaccine hesitancy in dogs and vaccine hesitancy in humans.
“The more Americans are hesitant about vaccinating their pets, the more demand there will be for policies that curb vaccination mandates, and the more likely people will take action by not vaccinating,” he said. Ta.
It's unclear what national trends are emerging in the way states regulate pet vaccinations since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but senior officials at the National Conference of State Legislatures Policy strategist Shannon Colman analyzes trends in several states. Most of the laws Colman considered would make it easier for people to protect their animals from rabies and expand the number of veterinarians eligible to administer vaccinations.
Chart by Megan McGrew/PBS NewsHour
However, a 2020 law enacted in Delaware states that if a veterinarian determines that “the vaccine jeopardizes the animal's health,” “a licensed veterinarian may administer the required rabies vaccination to the animal.” “exemption” is allowed. According to the AVMA, pets may develop side effects after vaccination, such as a low-grade fever and fatigue. However, the organization still recommends vaccination (and if severe side effects occur after vaccination, contact your veterinarian immediately). “Although these side effects are usually minor, the benefits of protecting your pet, family, and community from potentially deadly disease are far outweighed,” the report states.
Rohde said that after years of effort, rabies rates have dropped significantly, so “we're at a point where it's difficult to get people to understand and trust some of these measures.” For these success stories to continue, “we have to keep educating people,” Rohde said.
Decades ago, Rohde collaborated with a research team in Texas to reduce the transmission of rabies among wild animals. They flew in a grid pattern over animal habitats throughout South Texas, dropping baits filled with liquid vaccines that exploded when ingested by animals.
He said more work is now needed to reduce infections from bats, which he calls the “last frontier.” Bats can fly, he says, and “there are no geographic boundaries that they can't move.” But perhaps more frighteningly, bat bites don't resemble the stings you see in horror movies. Rather, it is more subtle, as if caught in a rose bush. Rohde said bats are dangerous because they are often overlooked, especially if the biting bat is infected with rabies.
For Ariel Henson, a dog and cat owner in South Hadley, Mass., rabies vaccination is an easy ethical question to answer, calling it “the fundamental vaccination that all my pets have received.” Rabies is deadly, and the vaccines that prevent rabies deaths are cheap and “not difficult to obtain,” Henson said.
“If your personal biases are interfering with your ability to be an ethical pet owner, you may want to reconsider owning a pet,” she says. “That seems obvious, but why not?”
