HOLISTIC VETERINARY CARE
  • Home
  • About
  • Appointments and Scheduling
  • BioScan
  • FAVORITES
  • Contact
  • Events
  • Testimonials
  • Blog
  • FAQs

Making Sense of Antibody Titers

6/22/2015

4 Comments

 
Antibody titers are available for the major infectious diseases of dogs and cats, including distemper, parvovirus, panleukopenia, calicivirus, herpesvirus, and rabies. The purpose of running an antibody titer is to verify that the animal has an objective measure of immunity to the disease in question. The titer itself is a blood test, so your vet will draw a blood sample from your pet and send it to a laboratory. The lab determines the greatest dilution at which antibodies to the disease in question can still be found. The laboratory also determines a dilution below which (they suggest) your pet will not have enough antibodies should it encounter the disease.

Now, titer results bear interpretation. It is not realistic to say that if there aren’t enough antibodies, or any measurable antibodies, then there is no immunity. Immunity to disease doesn’t work that way. This is why a titer test should not be used as a screening tool to determine whether your pet needs to be revaccinated.

For example, I have been vaccinated against polio three times in my life, the last time being 27 years ago. Do I have antibodies to polio in my blood right now? I hope not! What a waste of resources for my body to be busy making antibodies against a disease I will likely never encounter. Could I make antibodies to polio if I needed to? Sure, in a fraction of a second. This is why we have whole parts of the immune system devoted to remembering pathogens that we have met previously.

When I do titer tests on dogs for distemper and parvovirus, a very common result is that the dog has a low titer for distemper and a high titer for parvo. Sometimes there is no measurable distemper titer, but almost always that high parvo titer shows up. Why is that?

Parvo is a very stable virus that lasts practically forever in the environment. It is present wherever dogs have been. When dogs are vaccinated against parvo, they shed the virus in their feces for approximately 3 weeks afterwards. Therefore the virus is constantly being renewed in the environment as well. If you take your dog to a public park, parvovirus is there. If the people who lived in your house before you had a dog, parvovirus is there. This means that there is constant exposure and re-exposure to the virus.

Distemper, on the other hand, doesn’t last long outside the dog. Dogs need close contact to transmit distemper. They need to cough on each other and breathe in each other’s faces. Distemper is no longer a common disease outside of the vaccine, so there isn’t the routine exposure like dogs have with parvovirus. I have seen and treated many cases of parvo in my 18-year career as a veterinarian, but only one case of distemper (and that was vaccine-induced).

All this means that your dog might have a low or even not a measurable titer to distemper. Then how do you know whether they are immune? It’s difficult to know. There is also a possibility that the dog did not respond to the vaccine as desired and did not produce antibodies. Will giving another vaccine booster force the dog’s immune system to produce antibodies? Nobody knows.  

So this is the challenge with vaccine titer testing. We love it when test results are clear cut, and yes means yes and no means no. Unfortunately that is not the case with titers.

When I interpret these results, I think that any measurable antibody is a positive result, even if it doesn’t meet the laboratory standard for a “protective titer.” If you can produce one antibody, you can likely produce trillions (or however many it would take to fight off a disease) in nanoseconds. If you have no measurable titer, then the answer is unknown.

As far as I can tell, one antibody titer should be sufficient for the animal’s lifetime. Once you have proven your body’s ability to produce antibodies, you will always be able to. Even quite unhealthy animals and people will respond to vaccination with a positive titer, and this tells me that antibody production is quite easy for the body to do. Therefore, as long as you maintain a basic semblance of health and your immune system doesn’t self-destruct, you should be able to produce antibodies.

Please note that I am discussing viral diseases here, and that this information has no bearing on bacterial diseases, which are a whole other can of worms.

I was vaccinated for rabies in vet school, so likely about 20 years ago. Three or four years later I had my rabies titer checked, and it was high. Nobody ever sends me a postcard telling me to booster my vaccine, and I don’t ever need to check my titer again. It is good for life. And these vaccines likely provide our pets with lifelong immunity as well. For more information, check out the work done by Dr. Ron Schultz and Dr. Jean Dodds, and the Rabies Challenge Fund.

4 Comments
iwona
8/5/2015 11:40:35 am

Thanks for good explanation.

Reply
top rated resume writers link
2/22/2020 12:17:32 am

I have no idea how you did it, but you managed to surprise me again. I really love how you can make sense of anything. I had no idea what this was all about in the past, but now I have a concrete understanding of the topic. I hope that you make more of it in the future. I can really learn so much from watching the way that you work. I will try my best to make it happen in my end as well.

Reply
Pilar
8/10/2016 10:01:27 am

Good morning,





I care for a group of about 30 cats in rural Costa Rica. In 2014 I had an outbreak of something that could be a highly mutagenic or highly virulent strain of FECV/FIP or FPV. After losing eight cats, I'm now treating them at home and they are recovering very quickly. I'm trying to understand why this treatment is effective so quickly, even in cats with agonal breathing and severe anæmia.

I’m only giving them a combination of vitamins, so it’s inexpensive and has no side effects. Perhaps it’s possible to stimulate either the bone marrow so that more hæmatopoietic cells are produced, or the thymus so that more lymphocytes or cytokines are produced. Would you be willing to give this to cats as parenteral care and to kittens with fever, intractable diarrhoea, URIs, etc., and perhaps look at the populations of immatures or any chemical changes in the blood? I know that I don’t have a diagnosis but it’s possible that this treatment works for more than one virus. All my cats were attacked by mites and other opportunistic infections and as soon as the underlying virus was under control, their immune systems seemed to be able to control the parasites.

The cats that I took to the vet were all eating and acting normally, but initially were sent home with antibiotics or a remedy for gastrointestinal problems. I had a very bad feeling about this and I sent out fæcal samples, but the lab only said that there were no parasites. I was so distressed that I didn´t think of doing an autopsy until I found a stray cat with the same symptoms my cats had. When my cats started to die, I myself bought the FIV/FeLV test and the SPEED kit to do urine cultures. Two cats tested negative to FeLV, one tested positive. (I was told by an online vet that nowadays false positives are much more common that false negatives.) I bought a microscope and a used Lasercyte DX in the hope that my vet could at least detect the early signs of the disease and have more time to treat the cat. I also started researching cat diseases and after trying different things with no positive results, one of the kittens presenting ataxia and agonal breathing survived. I know I should have done other tests like the Idexx Parvovirus test and perhaps a biopsy to at least rule out FIP. The thing is I was emotionally exhausted, I was running out of money and all my cats were recovering very quickly.


Unfortunately my vet rarely sees other cats because local people just let cats die when they get sick. Even people who do love cats wouldn't pick up on subtle signs of illness and sometimes might take a cat to the vet when it stops eating, but most of the time they wait and see. I suspected that this was a widespread outbreak and when I asked, a woman told me that somebody had been poisoning cats, but another woman who lives there told me nobody in her neighbourhood would poison animals: people assume the cats have been poisoned because this virus kills so quickly. There are no cat shelters here and I live in a fairly remote area. I can't afford to do any more tests that might prove inconclusive and since stress seems to cause the virus to multiply or mutate I don't take them to the vet any more; all of them have recovered so I'd rather spend the money on something else.




The symptoms included some of the following in all cats: intractable, smelly diarrhoea that went on for months, where the solid and liquid parts were separated, very high fevers, ataxia, vomiting, dry cough or swallowing, susceptibility to ear mites, bladder infections, bloody pulmonary effusion, enlarged liver or kidneys, enlarged lymph nodes, agonal breathing and death. This all happened in a span of 12 months.

Other things have been considered including a nutrient deficiency. Even if the pet food company had reduced the amount of thiamine in cat food, I don't think that neonatal or young kittens should get sick since they were on formula and later on chicken. I also tried vitamin B separately and it had no effect. Other combinations of vitamins had no effect either. I can’t think of a toxin that would have an incubation period, and would affect small kittens rather than cats that roam farther away from the house, and seems to be species-specific, and can take over a year to kill a cat, or mere hours in weaker kittens. Even if this were a toxin, I imagine the cat’s immune system sees toxins as antigens, so perhaps the Th cells present this antigen to the macrophages to be phagocytised, or something else. But my point is that since this treatment is working so quickly, perhaps somebody would find the case interesting enough to test it with shelter cats for a few months, and see the results. I'll give some examples:



I took seven cats to the vet when they were still eating. The youngest kittens had intractable diarrhoea and very high fevers. Young cats seemed to have gastrointestinal problems, infections, a

Reply
Michele
7/28/2019 10:12:00 am

I have to agree to disagree on this topic. I am a firm believer that at least parvovirus and rabies vaccines are necessary. For one, it’s illegal in Illinois not to have a current rabies vaccine. Therefore so choose to do 3 year vaccine. As for parvovirus vaccine, I personally had a dog that was fully vaccinated with 4 doses of parvovirus vaccination last dose being at 20 weeks of age, so at roughly 5 months old. When the dog was 11 months old he became extremely sick with severe bloody diarrhea, lethargy, vomiting. He literally went from running and playing to down and out sick in a matter of a few minutes. Rushed him to the vet where they kept him with IV fluids, several hundreds of dollars in testing including xrays and ultrasounds. After 2 days in hospital, I authorized the vet to open him up and do exploratory surgery. Quoted “intestines were bright red kinked and angry”. Once intestines were straightened out a very foul fluid passed and again quoted “I said to my tech if I wasn’t the one who vaccinated this dog, I would swear that smells like parvo.” I authorized this fluid to be sent in for analysis. Next day I got the call... parvo!!
Just like in the human world, not all vaccines work 100% of the time in 100% of the patients.
I will always vaccinate against parvovirus

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Jessica Levy, DVM

    Archives

    March 2019
    June 2018
    April 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    October 2016
    May 2016
    October 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    March 2015
    December 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

©2023 Holistic Veterinary Care, LLC
1574 154th Ave NW
Suite 108
Andover,MN 55304

Inside Canine Crossing
Ph: 612-275- 2904 /
drlevy@holistic-vet-care.com






About               Contact                 Articles & Resources
Proudly powered by Weebly