>This shouldn't have happened.  No vaccine should be allowed on the market
>that can do this to an animal.  I am angry.  Not at the vets, but at the
>vaccine and the reaction.  This should NOT have happened.
 
First, my sympathies, both on the incident itself and on your loss.
 
You didn't mention what treatment the vet gave to counteract the reaction,
I'm assuming they DID do more than just stay with the ferret though since
reactions are a known problem with vaccines.
 
I'm sorry about what happened, but it DOES happen and not just with Fervac.
Individual animals have different immune systems and different body
chemistries and what's fine for one animal can be dangerous or deadly for
another.  Most animals go their whole life without any reactions.  Humans
have reactions too.
 
The 'danger level' for a medication is one of the things (if I recall
correctly from one of my college courses) that determines if a drug is
available Rx only or over the counter.  I don't recall the details but it
has to do with how big a gap their is between the effective dose and the LD
50 dose (LD 50 is the overdose amount that will kill half the animals it is
administered to.  That's where the name comes from; Lethal Dose 50%.  It's
determined as part of the testing for new drugs.) There are other
considerations too, I think one of them is the potential for the drug to be
addictive.
 
Over the counter (OTC) cold medicine is pretty tame stuff, right?  But every
year people have bad reactions to it.  How bad?  Well, my extranged husband
took one medication he hadn't taken before (normal dose, and he's a big guy)
and started hallucinating.  It turned out he was hypersensitive to one of
the ingredients-a normal dose for most folks is an overdose for him and the
symptoms he had were overdose symptoms.  We figured out what the ingredient
was and avoided having any cold medicine in the house that included it.
(He also called the company which made the medicine and they sent him an
incident form to fill out and return.)
 
As for me, I had bad a reaction to a OTC inhaler (the kind that is bullet
shaped that you stick up a nostril and sniff when you are congested.  I'd
used it before, the only difference was I was starting antibiotics that day.
 
Minutes after using the inhaler while on the antibiotics, my windpipe
tightened down so badly I could hardly breath.  (This was at 1am.) I had
Angel on the phone with poison control.  They assured him the two
*shouldn't* interact.  If it had gotten any worse (or if I'd been alone) I
would have gone to the ER.  I never used the inhaler while I finished off
the antibiotics; but used it with no problem afterwards.  Nothing else has
ever made me react like that.
 
Other people do wind up in the ER from reactions to cold/otc medicines.  And
animals have bad reactions to vaccines, to anesthetics (so do people).  The
bottom line is that more good than harm is done.  Fervac prevents more
deaths from distemper than it causes from reactions.  If the FDA nixed
*every* medicine that had *any* reaction risk from any person or animal,
guess what?  The shelves would be empty!  So small (hopefully very small)
levels of risk are deemed acceptable.
 
All you can do is try to minimize risk by making sure medical care is
available in case of a reaction (important if you self vaccinate).
 
-Ilena Ayala
[Posted in FML issue 2365]