Thank you for the link, I read this article last year as well as some others on Skeptvet about dog nutrition. The article doesnt say anything about one year booster being extremely important to building immunity, but gives a good explanation of difference between humoral and cell immunity and why titer testing does not give a conclusive answer on whether the dog is truly immune to a disease with both high and low titers. However, I went in the comment section now and this is what skeptvet wrote in response to one of the comments.
So as far as making decisions for your own individual dog, there is no way to be 100% certain that he or she is protected and doesn’t need a booster vaccination. High titers are a very good indicator that a vaccine is not necessary. Likewise, the recommended booster intervals are reliable for the vast majority of dogs (the same is true for humans, which is why we rarely have titers for the many things we get vaccinated against). Doing a titer annually or at some point earlier than the recommended booster interval could have several outcomes:
1. High titer- Your dog is almost certainly protected, and no vaccine is needed. Doing this test was probably unnecessary, but harmless and perhaps it reassures you.
2. Low titer- Your dog is likely protected since we’re within the recommended interval for boosters, but the test doesn’t tell us one way or another. You can choose to vaccinate, which is unlikely to do harm and which may or may not add protection (there really is no way to know). Or you could choose not to vaccinate, though again there is no other way to know if your dog is at risk. Or, there is a very tiny chance your dog could have low titers because it is a non-responder who doesn’t get protection from vaccination. In this case, vaccination won’t help directly, but again there is no way to confirm this with certainty.
and this
So given this evidence, I generally recommend an initial series for CDV and CPV, then boosters at 5-year intervals until about 10 years of age. That means, for most dogs 2-3 booster vaccinations. Most vets now boost every three years, so that might mean 4-5 boosters, depending on how long the dogs live and if they stop vaccinating at some point.
If we titer test annually (because we can’t predict from one test when the antibody levels will decline), then we might choose to skip some or all of these boosters for animals with high titers. This would be fairly safe, though the test does actually have a fairly high false positive rate, so depending on how many dogs in our test population have low titers, a fair number of them could mistakenly test as if they had high titers. |