Welcome to the Lepto dog vaccine home page. Lepto is the short name of Leptospira, or Leptospirosis, a diseases that dogs can get from other dogs and wildlife. Lepto can be passed on to humans as Weil's disease - which can cause blindness and other issues in humans.

Leptospirosis is a group of zoonoses (transferable to humans) with many synonyms that refer to the area where the disease was contracted or the host or the symptoms of the profession or activity of the patient.

Leptospirosis was first described by Adolf Weil in 1886, but the causal relationship with leptospira is adopted only in 1908, when an outbreak of Weil's disease among miners in Japan. Since then Leptospira isolated from almost any mammalian species as well as some amphibians and reptiles on all continents of the world (except Antarctica).

Leptospira bacteria are corkscrew-like, and many types (called serovars) are known. 

Lepto infection and symptoms

Cause of infection: Dogs become infected with Leptospires (an organism that thrives in water) by consuming urine contaminated water or contact with infected urine - such as sniffing, walking through or rolling in wet grass contaminated with lepto from another animal's urine. Leptospires use a dog’s kidneys to breed and continue living out their life cycle. Lepto strains that will infect dogs are known to be in Horses and Pigs, as well as rats, etc.

Symptoms include: fever, vomiting, depression, loss of appetite, generalised pain and conjunctivitis. Later symptoms include: a drop in temperature, increased thirst, change in urine colour, jaundice, frequent urination, dehydration, difficulty breathing, muscular tremors, vomiting and bloody faeces. Antibiotics can help shorten the length of the disease and reduce potential organ damage if caught in early stages. In more severe cases, kidney filtration and blood transfusion may be necessary. About 10% of Leptospirosis cases result in death from secondary complications.

Vaccination: The dog's immune system creates antibodies to help the dog fight the illness. Unlike the DHP vaccines, the Lepto vaccines do not prevent the dog from getting the disease, but helps the dog to combat the bacteria that it is vaccinated against.

Vaccination brands

It must be remembered that one brand of vaccine is not safer than another. It is not the brand that you dog might have a reaction to, but the product itself. Like all dog foods (including raw), you dog's chemical makeup might make it react to a brand that numerous other people have recommended. That is why it is the owner's decision to vaccinate or not.

Vaccination regime

 For a bacterial vaccine, such as Lepto, it is necessary to give two vaccinations a number of weeks apart. The vaccine is given to build up antibodies. If the dog then has a vaccination every 12 months, then the 18 month cover of the previous injection is strengthened/continued.

If there is a break of more than 18 months from the last vaccination, then it is necessary to start building up the antibodies again.

Unlike DHP, Lepto has only been clinically tested to 18 months. And until anyone wants to fund clinical trials of longer than 18 months then it will remain Clinically at 18 months.

If you look back at the Covid jabs that we had in 2020, we initially had two jabs a number of weeks apart, to build up the antibodies.

At the end of 2022 I asked the Health Security Agency as to how many humans had been infected with Lepto since 2010. Further, how many of those worked on a farm, and how many had been abroad.

The full response is here

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vtJNT2sE0ZaSYU9bOjKPk3qc-_EZKinZ/view?usp=sharing 

Extract of Forty Years of Canine Vaccination by M.J.G. Appel in 1999

from, Advances in Veterinary Medicine, Volume 41 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065351999800238?via%3Dihub 

XI.. Leptospirosis

Leptospirosis is a zoonotic disease of worldwide distribution. The disease may be fatal in dogs if left untreated (Hartman et al., 1986). Dogs may recover clinically after antibiotic treatment but may die from kidney failure and uremia several months or years later. The disease is caused by infection with antigenically distinct serovars of Leptospira. The most common serovars isolated from dogs used to be L. icterohaemorrhagiae, L. canicola, L. pomona, and L. grippotyphosa. However, in recent years outbreaks of leptospirosis in dogs infected with different serovars have been reported from Canada and Long Island. Raccoons, opossums, deer, rodents, and domestic livestock are reservoirs for most L. serovars with the exception of L. canicola, which is transmitted from dog to dog.

Bivalent bacterins for dogs that contain L. canicola and L. icterohaemorrhagiae have been on the market since the 1950s (Hartman et al., 1984a,b). They are prepared from chemically inactivated whole cells, which make them relatively allergenic. Because immunity after vaccination is highly serovar specific, immunized dogs are not protected from other types that are common in many areas and that may infect dogs. They may also suppress the immune response in young puppies and vaccination of pups less than 9 or 10 weeks of age should not be recommended. In addition, the vaccine-induced immunity in dogs is often less than 6 months, and repeated vaccination in endemic areas would be essential for protection (Broughton and Scarnell, 1985). It would be highly desirable to have specific outer surface (envelope) proteins for the immunization of dogs (Bey and Johnson, 1982) like the OspA vaccine in Lyme disease, another spirochetal disease, to reduce the risk of anaphylactic shock and other vaccine-related disorders. In addition, more serovars should be included in leptospira vaccines that correlate with the serovars in endemic areas.

Public health considerations: Leptospira-contaminated urine is highly infectious for people. Persistent infection in healthy vaccinated dogs with leptospiruria has been found with resulting development of the disease in people (Feigin et al., 1973).

With Lepto, it is a bit of Russian Roulette. 

I'm not a vet. I cannot provide you any reassurance on vaccines. All that you can take from the data available is that out of some 6 million vaccines sold from the pharmaceuticals to the vets per year, some 5 thousand dogs have adverse reactions. This means that some 5 million 9 hundred and 95 thousand did not have an adverse reaction recorded - but that doesn't mean something didn't happen. You also have to remember that some vaccine vials will have gone out of date or been broken, etc, so the figure of vaccines actually injected might be less than the 6 million sold to the vets, which makes the reaction rate higher. And there might be many dogs who had an adverse reaction who were not included in the figures due to the vet not accepting the symptoms being presented as being Lepto vaccine related - and therefore not reporting the case to VMD. 

We will never know how many dogs have been helped by the vaccine to fight Lepto, and we've been completely oblivious to the incident. I personally regularly wonder as to how many dogs who suffer with kidney issues, had actually been infected by Lepto at some point but the vet has only diagnosed the kidney issue and missed the complete picture. 

My personal experience with Lepto vaccines

I lost a cavalier to Zoetis' Lepto 4 after 9 years of his having Nobivac Lepto 2 without issue. My vets and the independent post-mortem pathologist at Animal Health Trust were adamant that the sudden destruction of his heart strings within days of the vaccine were not related to the vaccine. I disagree.

My second cavalier was vaccinated at the same time. She had no adverse reaction, but had a lump at the point of vaccination (her last vaccine) for 4 years until her heart gave out - that gradual heart thing is a standard Cavalier thing, so expected. 

My current cavalier (10 years old in 2022) had Duramune L2 as a pup and at age 1, and then Nobivac L4 at age 2 (her last vaccine) - and is curled up by my side with no effect. I'm not advocating Nobivac, I'm simply saying that we don't know who it will affect. 

Lepto is not just carried by rats, but also by horses, pigs, cows, and many other mammals. It is not just transferred at rivers, but is more likely to be caught in stagnant ponds, damp grass around where infected animals reside, etc. 

And we know from DEFRA's Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) that a very very small number of dogs in the UK have been infected by various strains of Lepto not covered by vaccines.

By 2022, some 14 types of Lepto had been identified in dog samples by APHA

Do take a look at the FZ2100 Non statutory Zoonoses report - at Section 2.2.2 

See  https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/non-statutory-zoonoses-disease-surveillance-reports

Whilst the vet is expected to report an adverse reaction to VMD, there are cases where the vet refuses to accept that the vaccine caused the issue that is now presenting. If you feel that the vaccine caused your dog's condition, then you can report the Adverse Reaction Event to VMD yourself.
Go to

 https://www.vmd.defra.gov.uk/adversereactionreporting/report-type  

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