Posted: Sun Jul 26, 2009 10:04 am Post subject: Clostridium vaccination
Hi everyone. Was wondering if I can pick your expert brains. I've been keeping goats for 4years with very few problems but the last 7mths have thrown everything at me!
Today one of my nannies died suddenly. She was three years old and apparently in excellent health. Eating fine and no discharges etc. Slaughterman is collecting body tomorrow and will do a post mortem for me.
The only strange thing was a swelling under her chin which went down within 24hrs and wasn't present today. The vets when spoken to about it before in another of my goats said it was probably an allergic reaction. That goat died about 5weeks ago but he had loss of condition and it was slow-vet thought it was an obscure worm-all wormed for it. Slaughterman reckoned it was liver fluke (not on Flukey ground but he's seen a significant increase in the last year in animals who shouldn't be susceptible) So all wormed for liver fluke as well.
Vet also recommended the clostridum vaccine (previous small herd owners I spoke to felt that it was an unecessary and ineffective vaccine with too many risks to be worth it for a small herd) Vet said there were risks that they could actually die from the vaccine and as it's to be done every 6mths it seemed a huge risk to me.
However after today I'm in a real dilemma as to what to do. Do any of you know the real side effects of the vaccine? (Heptavac is what I have in the fridge). Thanks in advance!
Hi, we always use Heptavac on all our goats. It doesn't generally cause any problems at all (very occasionally an allergic reaction, but I think the last time we had a reaction was about 10 years ago). We don't vaccinate every 6 months for every animal- in their first year of life, we vaccinate 3 times. Once after they are 8 weeks old, then again a month afterward, then a booster after 6-8 months, but after that one, just one booster a year from then on.
I would always vaccinate- years and years aog I was given a British Alpine kid by someone we knew- she developed tetanus through a tiny scratch and had to be put down because she nor her mother had been vaccinated.
Fluke has been getting worse over the last couple of years- and the volume of rain we've had doesn't help it any!
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