Putlands Veterinary Surgery, Caring for pets, horses and farm animals

To Vaccinate or not To Vaccinate?

Tuesday, December 16 2008

 That was the question that a distraught rabbit owner asked herself after she lost her young rabbit with myxomatosis despite having vaccinated him.

This client asked us to let her experience with the Myxomatosis vaccination be made known to other rabbit owners and potential rabbit owners.

She acquired a young rabbit in May of this year. She informed herself as best as she could on what to do for the best to care for the rabbit and came to the surgery to visit our Rabbit Clinic and to vaccinate against Myxomatosis and V(iral) H(aemorrhagic) D(isease)  two weeks later. 4-5 months into the Myxomatosis vaccination the rabbit became ill and on arrival at the surgery we diagnosed that the rabbit had contracted the fatal form of Myxomatosis. We had to put the animal to sleep.

This caused of course huge distress to the family and especially for her little daughter. Despite doing everything right by vaccinating the rabbit it still was struck by this disease. What went wrong?

We don’t know the exact answer to this question, we have to assume that the rabbit didn’t respond to the vaccination as we would have expect it to and unfortunately we do see a few cases like this every year. We also see every year a few cases of the atypical form of Myxomatosis or ‘lumpy bumpy syndrome’ which causes skin lesions. This can happen when a vaccinated rabbit is heavily challenged by the virus but has a degree of immunity. This form usually is not fatal.

What we know for a fact is that every year we see many more rabbits dying from Myxomatosis because they weren’t vaccinated.

There isn’t a vaccination that guarantees a full protection against any disease but without vaccination the rabbit doesn’t stand a change.

In this region in particular we have a large population of wild rabbits, together with the increased popularity of the house rabbit the chance of contracting the disease has increased. We feel that we cannot warn rabbit keepers enough about the deadliness of the Myxomatosis virus and we believe that the best possible protection we can give to our house rabbit is to vaccinate them.

We will monitor the situation every year and act accordingly in the best possible way. For now the advice will remain to vaccinate your rabbit every 6 months against Myxomatosis.

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