While I get lots of interesting infectious disease questions every day, most aren’t new.

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This one was.

To paraphrase, the question was basically “If we want to minimize the number of injections when vaccinating a dog, can we mix rabies and core (e.g. distemper, parvovirus, adenovirus) vaccines in the same syringe, using rabies vaccine

Canada has a long-standing requirement for rabies vaccination of most categories of dogs and cats being imported from countries not considered free of non-bat rabies.  While this requirement helps protect dogs and cats from rabies infection should they be exposed to endemic wildlife rabies that is present in Canada, it does little to prevent rabies

We have different  approaches to rabies in dogs and cats versus humans. The ultimate goal is still the same: preventing this almost invariably fatal infection. However, between humans and animals there are differences in who we target for vaccination, frequency of vaccination, utility of rabies antibody titres, and how we respond to potential rabies exposures,

For some reason, I’ve been spending a lot more time lately discussing vaccination, so I figured I’d write about a series of vaccine issues, questions and dogmas (that are often non-evidence-based or just downright wrong).

Age for first rabies vaccine

Here in Canada at least, rabies vaccines are licensed for use in dogs and cats