From:
Caitlyn Martin
Date: 2004-06-20 22:27:19 UTC
Subject: Re: [ferrethealth] vaccine reactions
To: ferrethealth@smartgroups.com
Message-ID: <20040620222719.46034.qmail@web50810.mail.yahoo.com>
Hi, everyone,
None of my ferrets ever had a reaction to a distemper
vaccine before age 5. Lady Ayeka was the first, and
it was a moderately severe reaction to Merial Purevax.
She was vaccinated this year (she's now 6) with (I
think) Galaxy D and had no reaction at all.
Merial Purevax is apparantly on backorder until
midsummer. Since we never had a reaction with Galaxy
D or Fervac-D we went ahead and vaccinated Chin Soon,
Nyssa, and Adric with (I think) Galaxy D. Chin Soon
was fine, Adric had a very mild reaction (a little
vomiting) and Nyssa had a moderate ly severe reaction
(she turned bright red in addition to vomiting) and
was promptly treated with Benadryl and dexamethasone.
She slept after that and is fine now. We'll stick
with Merial Purevax except for Lady Ayeka.
We've actually had more problems with rabies reactions
than distemper reactions. Every last one of our
ferrets except Chin Soon (who's only a year old) has
had a reaction at one time in their life or another.
Nyssa had an anaphylactic reaction (vomiting,
diarrhea, then went into shock and collapsed) within a
few minutes of her rabies vaccination at age one.
I've posted before about how we pretreat for three
days with dexamethasone in order to be able to
vaccinate her. Podo had an anaphylactic reaction
(vomiting, turned bright red, swelling, difficulty
breathing, collapse) within a minute of his rabies
vaccination at age eight. He has multiple health
problems and is almost 10 now so we no longer
vaccinate him. All our other ferrets have had mild
reactions, some as young as age one, some not until
age five, and are pretreated with Benadryl prior to
vaccination.
I don't think there is any particular danger
associated with the fifth distemper vaccination. I do
think that Fervac-D has a much higher reaction rate
than either Galaxy D or Merial Purevax, which is why
our vet stopped using it years ago. Merial Purevax
seems to have the fewest reactions but is relatively
new.
All the best,
Caity and the super six
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