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    RE: [RC] West Nile - Maryanne Stroud Gabbani


    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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