An edited transcript of the video is provided below:
What I want to talk to you about today is an update for cat vaccines. Now, we make our recommendations for cat vaccines based on these national guidelines that are created by the experts in the field, typically from the American Association of Feline Practitioners and the Animal Hospital Association. We take those guidelines and we use those to direct how we’re going to make our vaccine recommendations. Typically when these things get updated every few years they’re pretty boring events because not really all that much changes. But this year something big changed, there was actually a real significant change in these recommendations, and that’s really great so I want to give you an update on our cat vaccinations because it’s been the same for a long time.
Cat vaccines are the same for adult cats, there’s nothing that has changed there. There are a lot of vaccines on the market for cats but we only recommend two, maybe three vaccines. If they’re indoor-only cats we recommend the FVRCP and the rabies vaccine, and if they go outdoors then we’ll also recommend the Feline Leukemia Virus vaccine. For adult cats, all that stuff is the same. The difference and the change came in is with kitten vaccines. So with kittens, we used to give them vaccines at 8, 12 and 16 weeks, and then a year later, and that’s really what we’ve been doing for a long time. However, this is where the change came in, is that these guidelines actually recognized and found up to one third of all kittens were not protected after this series because the antibodies from the mother that they get when they’re born were actually blocking these vaccines a lot longer than we thought they were supposed to. So up to a third of cats weren’t protected after getting their kitten series which was leaving them at risk to come down with things like panleukopenia, which is a really terrible disease. So instead of now giving the vaccines at 8, 12 and 16 weeks and then a year later, these guidelines now recommend giving them that last one at 8, 12, 16 weeks, and then again 2 months later, so they’re getting it at 6 months instead of a year. So that’s big, and that really has made us change what our recommendations are and what we’re telling people kind of what to expect as they get through these kitten series.
These things are really exciting for us, and I think it’s a really good example of how we are a next-generation veterinary hospital. Things change, information changes, and that’s one of the things that we do, we’re actually out there, we’re getting this information, and we are implementing it as it comes in because science really does find new things that makes us change what we do and it makes these pets healthier, and that’s kind of what we’re all about here and why we’re so happy that we’re here and we can implement this and hopefully prevent your cat from being one of these non-responders to the vaccines and keep them healthier through their kitten years. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to reach out. I’m Dr. Brian Evans here at Coastal Animal Hospital, till next time.
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