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.
Oh for fuck’s sake…
I said the exact same thing. People are stupid.
Welp, looks like rabies is gonna have a huge comeback. I bet there’s a huge overlap with antivaxx owners and unleashed pets too.
As the disease progresses, the person may experience delirium, abnormal behavior, hallucinations, hydrophobia (fear of water), and insomnia. The acute period of disease typically ends after 2 to 10 days. Once clinical signs of rabies appear, the disease is nearly always fatal,
I believe the current survival rate is 29 people ever.
Sauce. It’s a bit old at 2020 though so there are probably a few more.
It’s a bit old at 2020 though so there are probably a few more.
Well the average is 1 survivor every 167 years, so I’d say that’s charitable.
Well the average is 1 survivor every 167 years, so I’d say that’s charitable.
This is nonsense lmfao. Why you even said this after I linked a literal study about the surviving cases is beyond me.
30 survivors in 5000 years = 1/167. Apparently it’s about 4000 years, so 1/133. My bad.
Do you believe the earth is 5000 years old or something?
The first unvaccinated person to live from rabies was in 2004 due to the Milwaukee Protocol.
2023 - 2004 = 19. 29/19 = 1.53 survivors per year.
Cats too. I hate that people let cats roam, it’s irresponsible and shitty to just let your pet out to do whatever it wants with everyone else’s property. And now there are gonna be unvaccinated, rabid cats roaming and infecting it further.
Hey maybe the apocalypse is coming and this is the start of a zombie/aggressive rabies outbreak!
cocks shotgun not if I can help it
I feel sorry for the dogs that will suffer because of this nonsense.
You’re going to deny them all that 5G coursing through their veins? Think of the speed increase!
Babe wake up, 6G vaccines just dropped
I feel sorry for the humans that will suffer from incurable diseases like rabies because of this nonsense.
If you don’t vaccinate your pet, you should be disallowed from owning it
And then they should be spayed or neutered, for responsible population control.
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.
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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.
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.
That is literally the law where I am, an most cities I thought. Dogs are required to have a rabies vaccine.
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.
On the plus side, some of those owners are bound to be bitten.
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)
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.
Updates on Rabies virus disease: is evolution toward “Zombie virus” a tangible threat?
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.
I mean… they kinda already are.
Not enough.
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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 one the wall and make fun of you. You should leave town, and then go another mile away, and I get each other.
Savage.
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.
I’ve recently encountered a cat rescue that rehomes their feral cats without giving them their rabies vaccines and NOT disclosing this. Ask me how I know and am 11 needles deep…they asked me to lie to public health and maintain that rabies isn’t actually necessary and I wasn’t really put at risk (?!)
It’s fucking ludicrous and public health barely responded.
I am all for saving and rehoming ferals but holy hell VACCINATE AGAINST RABIES. The reason it’s not as prevalent is BECAUSE OF THE VACCINES.
This is awful!
Can you complain further up the chain, at a county or state level?
Do these people actually want to experience rabies, a disease with 99.9999999999% death rate, for themselves? Well, good luck for them, and natural selection will prevail.
Unfortunately the dog is probably more likely to bite someone else, not a member of the family that refused to vaccinate him.
Killing your dog to own the libs
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.
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.
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.
This would be decried as authoritarianism in many part of the US
Meanwhile I was thrilled when my vet got the bunny vaccine, which had to be specially imported under special rules from Europe. And I was even more thrilled that a US made alternative just became available because it doesn’t involve growing live virus in bun buns. Hell no we don’t want RHD2, and IMHO you would have to be insane to withhold that vaccine from your bun buns.
Buns don’t get rabies vaccines but I’m perfectly happy to vaccinate my cat against whatever the vet suggests.
The article does not link the study. It can be found linked from the authors site (https://www.mattmotta.com/publications) here: https://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)
US adults
Can you please start educating your country
someone has to make the loud ones sit down and shut up first
My country? I’m Canadian.
Granted, we’re ten years behind the US at most.
You can’t make someone learn when they’re determined to remain ignorant. So no.