Vaccine Sarcomas in Cats

Silas hopes that cat owners will educate themselves about vaccine-related sarcomas in cats by reading the many, many relevant articles in the scientific literature, especially in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. They will find a mass of scientific literature going back to 1991, tracing the development of these sarcomas from the moment when veterinary pharmaceutical companies began adding adjuvants, usually an aluminum compound, to killed virus rabies and leukemia vaccines. Research has demonstrated that these adjuvants are the most likely cause of these sarcomas. These deadly tumors are not at all uncommon. Any veterinary oncologist sees many, many of them every year. The authors of the various studies have had no difficulty in identifying hundreds of cats with these fatal sarcomas. Unfortunately, many veterinarians apparently ignore the literature of their profession. They continue to vaccinate cats in the scruff of the neck and ignore the composition of the vaccines they use, despite the recommendations of the American Association of Feline Practitioners 2006 Feline Vaccine Advisory Panel Report.

“Vaccine-Associated Feline Sarcomas,” an article by Wallace B. Robinson, Robin M, Starr, and the vaccine-Associated Feline Sarcoma task force (Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, March 1, 2001), notes that as many as 22,000 cats may develop these sarcomas in a given year. This may be a very conservative estimate, considering that the sarcomas can take several years to occur and veterinarians are not required to report them. We want our pets and ourselves protected against rabies, but minimizing or ignoring the risk of vaccine-associated cancer is foolish and unnecessary. Careful and knowledgeable vaccination practice and the use of non-adjuvant vaccines, not blank denial, are what we should expect from our veterinarians.