Ridecamp: RE: [RC] West Nile

West Nile appeared in the New York City area just at the same time that we
were delivering our son to university at Columbia. Epidemiology has always
been sort of a hobby of mine and I was fascinated to see how the disease was
spreading and the reaction to it. I'll grant you that it is sort of a
small-pox infected blanket phenomenon (my personal bet being that it was
brought to the US by an infected human) and that it was identified as being
(at least around NYC) as being a North Sinai/Israeli strain, which is one of
our reasons for not vaccinating. North Sinai/Israel are quite a way from the
Nile Valley and across some pretty dry area, so we don't have any assurance
that we have the same strain. There are zillions of horses here but we don't
have the big vet schools with R&D budgets because the people who own the
horses are too poor to afford medications. West Nile has spread as far as
areas of Northern Europe and south Russia, as well as North America, and
some of the areas have other variants of the virus.

With the amount of travel in the world today, movement of viruses and
bacteria becomes that much easier. North and South America have been
relatively isolated until recently from some of the good germs we have in
Africa, but I suspect we will see more and more germ-swapping as time goes
on. I get sick from food in Europe and the US when I travel sometimes but
none of the visitors to Egypt who stay with me in my home get any nasty bugs
from food or water. That isn't because I'm a clean fanatic...lord, with 14
dogs that's hopeless, but I do put people on vitamins and basic cleanliness.
I wonder how much difference it's going to make to most of the horses and
people in the US that the vaccines are used, other than to make a bundle for
the manufacturers. I know it's definitely not PC, but I read a very
interesting article in Natural History, the magazine of the New York Natural
History Museum, by an Indian-raised biologist now in the US who has found
that there are co-dependencies between diseases, parasites and the immune
system and that an immune system that is challenged regularly is usually
stronger. He noted that he wouldn't want his kids to grow up with the same
bugs as he did in India, but he worries that maybe they are missing
something at the same time.

I can see vaccinating horses in the US if you can afford it, but how long
will it take for the virus to mutate into a different form, and will the
vaccinated horses be able to handle that form? If it were something like
tetanus with a horrendous fatality rate, I'd vaccinate right away like I do
for tetanus (though we managed to pull an abandoned mare through that too).
But this virus has mild flu-like symptoms in most healthy humans and horses
and is rarely fatal if the immune system isn't already compromised. I
question the wisdom of vaccinating for everything. Like my brother in law
commented about a friend of his son's who was raised on a horrifically
strict health food diet, "One day he'll buy a Big Mac and drop dead."

Maryanne Stroud Gabbani
Cairo, Egypt
maryanne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.ratbusters.net
apologies for the length but it's been a long day in dismal offices and it's
so nice to think of something else for a bit.



    It's new here and there are no
built up immunes or whatever, so it hits harder.  For me, what made me
decide to vaccinate my herd was Texas A&M.  They sent out the
recommendation for Texas to do it.  I figure a large Vet School would be
more up on the broad impact of a virus/sickness than my local vet, so we
vaccinated on TAMU's say so.




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