Hello there! This is Krista with episode number 121 on the Wag Out Loud pawdcast. Do you home cook for your dog? Did you know that there are two great resources to help ensure that your recipes are nutritionally complete and balanced? You can check out https://www.petdiets.com/ or https://secure.balanceit.com/. These are two great websites that are super easy to use, and will help you feel more confident that you are feeding your dog all of the nutrients they need to stay healthy. Welcome to the Wag Out Loud pawdcast where we are obsessed with bringing you helpful tips on canine health care, nutrition and overall well-being. If you'd like to support the show, check out the amazing online events, products and resources that I personally recommend on the Wag Out Loud website. I'm your host Krista and I'm super excited to be bringing you yet another tail wagging episode. Hello dog lovers! Welcome to another learning opportunity on the Wag Out Loud pawdcast. Today we have Ed Bond on the show and he's going to chat about a new hope for distemper dogs. So Ed, thank you for being here. Why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your journey with dogs. Hi. So thanks again for having me on your show. I really appreciate this opportunity. What I want people to know about me first is that I don't like dogs dying when they don't have to. And I believe that's what's going on with canine distemper. The second thing you need to know is that I'm not a vet or a doctor or scientist. My background is in journalism, I can't really claim to have proven that there is a cure for canine distemper. what I am asking for is help in putting these theories to the test. And third, I have pragmatic and rational reasons to believe why dogs can be saved from distemper and the best way for me to explain that is just by telling my story if that's okay with you. Yeah! Before you do that, if you don't mind, because I know when we get a puppy and we go to the vet and they get, you know, the recommended vaccinations, we hear about this distemper vaccine, but do we really know what it is? So can you first tell us Ed what exactly is canine distemper? Sure, it's a virus. It's a Paramyxoviridae virus, which puts it in the same category of measles and mumps and Newcastle's disease. So those viruses are all related. And it is that measles at one point back in the 1700s mutated and turned in to and that it could give dogs distemper and so now, this is now a dog disease. What it does is it will first usually attack the respiratory system. you're going to see coughing, gunky nose, fever, you're going to see other things go on like dry eye, dry pads of feet, etc. And after about six days, the disease progresses into a neurologic phase. And that will give you your muscle tics, your twitches, your spasms, your seizures, your paralysis, blindness. It is an awful stage of the disease. And that is usually when dogs get euthanized. And it's just an awful, it's just awful. We went through this we've lost two puppies to canine distemper back in 1996. They both hit the neurologic stage, and it was just an awful thing to see them die. They were like a few months apart. And then in 97, we had our dog Galen. And that's really where the story starts. Oh, gosh, I can't even imagine going through that. And it's highly contagious. Correct? In closed, especially in enclosed environments, like shelters, it spreads through aerosol droplets that are expelled through the nose usually, so a dog coughs and sneezes inside the shelter. That little aerosol droplet travels and gets sucked in by another dog and that dog gets distemper. that's actually a very unstable virus. It doesn't last outside a dog for very long and it's something that is easily destroyed by cleaning chemicals. So they need to have protocols in place to keep it from spreading from dog to dog. Sure. And Ed is this a virus that is worldwide? Can you find it everywhere? Year round as well? Yes, it is. I have heard from people from all over the world while doing this. India, Philippines. South America, throughout Asia, Eastern Europe, and especially also in the southern United States, Florida, Texas, California. And it does travel more readily in warm environments, just because the dogs are interacting with other dogs, and they're also interacting with wildlife, which are also a backup reservoir for the disease. So like raccoons and other canids can carry distemper. So that's why you know, vaccination is very important to try to control this. Because even if we had 95%, of vaccination of dogs, they're still going to be distemper waiting to strike from the surrounding wildlife. But it can happen any time of the year, it can happen any time in the world, even in what you would think of as cold climates. I have had people email me from Canada, I think even Alaska. And I have had people emailing me from all times of year. So it's it's not a disease to be trifled with. It's always there. And we're dealing with a disease and a virus with ourselves right now. So I can only imagine with the dogs and to your point that already already is in wildlife, that we have to get this under control. So the statistic that I found is that canine distemper is often fatal, with a mortality rate of 50% in adult dogs and 80% and puppies, is that current? That's right, that's like you have the same info I have that. I got that from Cornell's website. They have a wildlife database or something of that sort that I saw. Yeah. Well, I would love for you to share your story. Unfortunately, you have lived through this several times. So why don't you share your story with us? Sure. So this goes back to 1997 when I was a reporter for The Los Angeles Times. Mmy wife, Amy and I adopted a dog that my sister Karen had rescued from the streets. His name was Galen. He was a chow/lab mix. He was a little bit psycho, but we loved him. And it was but it was like, just a few days after we got him, we realized that he was starting to show those early respiratory signs of canine distemper. He had the cough, sneeze, the gunky nose, the fever. And we realized that something was going on. We got him to the vet, the vet diagnosed him with canine distemper, and we were just absolutely devastated because we had just gone through losing two puppies to this disease the year before. But while we were trying to save those puppies, one of the things that we heard about was that there was this vet up in Lancaster, California, which is an hour north of Los Angeles. It’s up where Edwards Air Force base is in the desert. and that we heard that he had a serum that could cure canine distemper, but we didn't get a chance to call him until… we did call his clinic. Just as the second Puppy was starting the neurologic phase. And it was too late to save that puppy. It had to be before the neuro stage hit. So Galen had not hit the neuro stage yet. So we had a chance. So we decided to go with this and try to get him up to see Dr. Sears. So I had to work. So my sister Karen volunteered to drive him up to Dr. Sears’ clinic. And then two days later, Karen and Amy went up to pick him up and brought him home. And when he got home, he walked through the door of the backyard. And was completely strong and healthy. The cough, the fever, the gunky nose, it's all gone. There's just little bits of dryness leftover in the eyes and the pads of the feet and the nose. And those were treated with ointments. But he was hale and hearty when he came home after that two day visit. So if he had beaten the virus, then so we were absolutely amazed by this because we knew how bad canine distemper could be. It's just the, you know, dangerous, fatal, often fatal disease, as you know. So, like I said, I was working for the LA Times at the time, and I decided I wanted to write a story about this, and I tried, but I couldn't. And the major obstacle was that Dr. Sears had never gotten his discovery published in a journal. He didn't know how to go about getting acceptance, and he didn't know how about going about properly documenting this. But what had happened was that back in the early 70s, in 1972, he read a journal article where researchers found that Newcastle's disease vaccine could boost levels of interferon in cats. Newcastle's disease is a virus that attacks chickens. But it is also known to create a reaction in the cells of mammals to make interferon. interferon is a protein made by cells to inhibit the replication of viruses and some cancers. Okay, so I just dropped a lot of science on you. No, it's good stuff. All right. So Dr. Sears when he read this, he was in the midst of dealing with boxes and boxes of dogs, dead dogs who died of distemper, and he was trying to find any way he could do to control this. So when he read this article, you know, the light bulb went on for him and he realized, well gee, here's an antiviral treatment that we haven't tried yet maybe this can help dogs with distemper. So he set about the try to create canine interferon using NDV (Newcastle's disease vaccine). So he goes about doing this, and this results in a serum. And he sends a sample of it to Cornell. He asked Cornell to test it for interferon. In the meantime, he gets a dog comes in the door, almost immediately has canine distemper. He doesn't know if it's gonna work or not, but he's got a dog that is probably gonna die. If he doesn't try. He tries it on the dog. The next day, the dog is completely well, other dogs come in to his office, like a handful of other dogs come in. Not too long afterwards. He treats those he's seeing them recover, too. In the meantime, Cornell finally comes back with the study of well, the results of the lab test and they say the serum sampling sampling you sent us does not can't contain interferon, we suggest that you don't use it. Oh, he writes them back to say, Hey, I used it and it cleared a dog of distemper almost, you know, within 24 hours, and they didn't reply to him. And I'm gonna stop you there. This is oh my gosh, I can't wait for the rest of the story. We are going to take a quick commercial break and we will be right back. Sponsor Ad I'd like to thank our friends at HAPPYBOND for sponsoring this episode. 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Ed, Okay, so Dr. Sears gets word back from Cornell …take it from here. Yeah, so Cornell says your serum does not contain interferon. And what Dr. Sears when he thought about this later on what he what he concluded was, well, if this serum doesn't have interferon, it perhaps there is some other material that we don't know about that might be responsible for helping dogs get over this disease. But he didn't have the means to figure that out for himself. But everyone he tried to talk to about this either laughed at him or dismissed them. And it's because he really didn't know how to go about documenting and presenting this. It didn't get published in a journal and it didn't get acceptance. Now, this is something that I think that many clinical vets have they have a business to run. They have to treat every animal for every type of ailment. They work long hours just to keep their heads above water. And it's hard for them to have the time and the resources to properly document a new discovery. And that's something that I've seen in the course of writing this book. So Dr. Sears couldn't get acceptance. So he just decided to just keep using his serum and treating dogs. And what he told me that in the course of the ensuing years, he probably treated about 600 dogs with canine distemper. And if he could get to them before the neuro stage hit, they could, they could save about 90% of them, or more than 90%. Wow. But it was because when I came along, he hadn't had this published, I couldn't get this in the LA Times. So shortly after this, I leave the LA Times, and I go into a job teaching college journalism. And I sort of forgot about the Dr. Sears story until three years later, I'm getting ready to teach a class. And I'm looking for writing examples for my students. And I'm going through my notes, and I find the old Dr. Sears story with my notes. And I said to myself, Oh, gee, I really wish that I had gotten that out into the world. And about the time at about this time, I was thinking about starting my first website. So I decided to post Dr. Sears’ story to my new website, Edbond.com. This is in May of 2000. And so after that, within a few months, I started getting Thank you emails from people saying, I got my dog to Dr. Sears and he saved me, saved them from canine distemper. So when I posted this, I wasn't trying to fight for Dr. Sears I wasn't trying to prove that he had this effective treatment. I wasn't trying to get involved in in the world of science. My only goal was that I regretted not being not having a chance to tell the public about this before and I just wanted at least people in Southern California if they could get to Dr. Sears to have their dogs treated, they can do so. But I didn't want to fight for this. I knew enough about the world about science to know that I would not be equipped to fight that battle. So later on Amy and I moved to upstate New York. In 2006 Galen died of liver trouble. He'd never been bothered by distemper again. And shortly after that Dr. Sears retired and moved to Utah and that should have been the end of the story. But it wasn't. in 2008, a woman in Romania named Matta Luxandrew tracked me down and asked if her vet could use Dr. Sears’ serum to save her dog from distemper. Now, again, I didn't want to get involved in this, I didn't want to get involved in this emergency on the other side of the world, I had a life to live. But I told her the protocols were there on the website for anyone to use, just go ahead. A few months later, she messages me on Facebook. They weren't able to save her dog. But when the vet made the serum, he saved at least five dogs with it. This got my attention. This is when the light bulb went on for me. I'm not a scientist. But I know that in science results need to be repeatable. A vet on the other side of the world had followed Dr. Sears’ protocol to make the serum and has similar results. Now I wanted to fight for this. I really regretted sitting on this for as long as I had. So this is 2008. I've been sitting on this for 11 years, and I felt really guilty about not doing anything about after all that time. But I'm still I'm not a scientist or a doctor or a vet or a researcher. My background is in journalism. I was working as a copy editor for The Star Gazette of Elmira, New York at the time. And there's no reason in the world for anyone in the science world of science to listen to me. So I didn't even know how to ask for help on this in the right way. But I came up with a plan and I sent this ask out into the world. Here's Dr. Sears’ protocol, use them. make the serum. treat dogs with distemper and then report back to me what outcomes you have. I sent this message all over the world and in every way that I could think of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogger, WordPress, etc. This is 2009. Later that year, my sisters Jane and Karen founded a small nonprofit called Kind Hearts in Action. Their goal was to rescue street dogs and find them homes. Remember Karen rescued Galen off the street and found him a home. She made a habit out of that. she kept doing that because she’s that kind of a person. So they founded Kind Hearts in Action in order to make that more official and more formal. They brought me in as a volunteer on canine distemper because distemper hits street dogs often. And so I used that website to promote Dr. Sears’ treatment and collect stories about the outcome of cases. My goal was to do whatever I could to save the lives of the most dogs and to me, that meant that we needed to get this documented and published in a veterinary journal. My hope had been that if enough of these stories could be collected, maybe somebody somewhere would take an interest and do a real study. But we had a catch 22. The experts wouldn’t look at this because there have been no published studies. And there were no published studies because they wouldn't look at it. So the information I collected was entirely anecdotal. And I knew it was. the diagnosis and the records of these cases that were sent to me were not done systematically. I just accepted what the dog owners, the caregivers and the vet sent me. Sometimes I got lab reports and patient files. Sometimes I got before and after photos before and after videos. But this was all inconsistent and anecdotal. But my end goal had always been to see all this put to the test, and have the scientists evaluate this on their own terms. I just foolishly hoped that some scientists would have the light bulb go on for them and say, Oh, yes, I should do a study. It didn't happen. But from 2008 until 2016, I kept track of hundreds of these anecdotal cases. And this was now with three kinds of treatments. There was the NDV serum for dogs who are not yet in the neurologic stage. There was another protocol which didn't rely on making the serum, it was just putting an injection of NDV into sick dogs. That was not ideal, but it was, but it also had a chance of saving dogs before the neuro stage. And then there was the NDV Spinal Tap, which was an attempt to save dogs in the neuro stage by injecting NDV directly into the spinal canal. Nearly half of those dogs recovered after treatment, which is amazing, since most dogs who reached that neuro stage are typically euthanized. Right! Now there is a real question I have to say about NDV spinal tap. And that's because we did get a study on the NDV Spinal Tap by a professor at Kansas State. But he came away from it unconvinced that the NDV was saving these dogs, he just felt that if you give dogs enough time, to outlast the virus before until it goes silent, and you give them enough nursing care and support, they have a chance to have a decent quality of life after that. But it still either way, one thing is clear to me, which is that we give up on these dogs who hit neuro stage too early. From my experience. In many cases I have throughout the book, many of these dogs can survive and have a decent quality of life. For years, even after neurologic stage begins, I think it really comes down to if they have a willingness to live, they have a good chance to survive. And the adage is, if they keep eating, there's still hope. That means that they're still willing to fight and there's ways to help them keep eating. But anyway, the the full breakdown of all my anecdotal information is in the book, but I want to tell you about a couple of key pieces. We had 611 dogs with distemper treated by vets using at least one of Dr. Sears’ protocols. Of those, 72% of dogs survived. of the 611, 305 of those were treated by the serum before reaching the neurologic stage. of those, 86% of dogs survived. So like, as you said before, according to Cornell 50% of adult dogs that get distemper die 80% of puppies die, that's according to their numbers using the approved treatments. And I honestly believe that we can reverse those numbers. So the good news is that after all this, I just finally know a better way to ask and that's what's in the book. I am sending out a new request out into the world. I think what we need are three people to get together. We need a veterinarian, we need a medical science writer, we need a medical writer or a science writer. And three we need a head of a dog rescue or an animal shelter dealing with canine distemper and what I suggest is that this vet make Dr. Sears’ serum, treats dogs in the pre neurologic stage of distemper. Perhaps when a dog rescue or animal shelter is dealing with an outbreak, the medical writer or science writer would properly document every step of each case, diagnosis, treatment outcome etc. And the goal would be for the science writer to work with the vet to either write a paper to submit to a veterinary journal or to make a presentation to a veterinary conference. I have another more elaborate plan that's in the book that involves how we could do this and have a double blind study and things of that sort. But what I gave you is the bare bones simplest way to move this forward, I think has the best chance for success for this would be if some organization or nonprofit with the resources to do this pick this up. You know, as I said, I've had a lot of individuals from all around the world respond to my first ask, they've helped by using these protocols and using them and reporting back to me but I've done as much of this as I can, as a one man band, and I don't know how much more I can do on my own. But I'd be glad to hear from someone else who did want to attempt this and I I'd love to hear from them. So my I would say for more information about all this or to reach me I would point you to my websites which are SaveDistemperDogs.com or https://www.kindheartsinaction.com And or you can also go to the Save Dogs from Distemper Facebook page, the book, : SAVE DOGS FROM DISTEMPER: The ‘Impossible’ Cure of Dr. Alson Sears is available through Kindle and Amazon print on demand. Wow, you have done so much already. And I do hope that there are others that pick up the ball. The question I have this Newcastle's disease vaccine is that very common and prevalent? Do most vets have that already, so that they can do the protocol? Yeah, it's very easy to get. It's the most easy is most one of the most easily available materials that induce interferon. When Dr. Sears went to create his first serum, all he had to do was go down to the local agricultural store and buy it off the shelf. And I think at the time back in the early 70s, he bought, he bought a case of it for 10 bucks. It is actually available online very easily. And basically any anybody who does supplies for chicken ranches, they would have NDV available as well. There was a there's a story in in the book about dog named Nilla, where this farmer in South Dakota, had this dog that his the neurologic stage of distemper and he was the one who got his dog to Kansas State. And it took a weekend of calling all over because he was trying to do it on the weekend. But he was actually able to pick up he was in South Dakota, he picked up the NDV. Well, I think, Iowa and then drove to Kansas State so that they could do the NDV Spinal Tap on his dog there. But it but it is it is a readily available material. Okay. Well Ed I can't thank you enough for all the work that you have done thus far. It's amazing. But obviously, you've lived it. And you saw how this protocol changed your dog's life. I mean, you saved your dog's life by reaching out to Dr. Sears. So if anybody is interested in speaking with Ed about this, or you have a connection to a university or a veterinarian or medical writer, please reach out to Ed because he has done so much work. You know, even though it's anecdotal. A lot of times we say the same thing about raw feeding. Oh, you don't have any studies? It's just anecdotal. But those of us that do it, know. Yeah. So I think especially if there might be a fund a foundation or nonprofit or some other organization that probably has the means to make this all happen, it's just a matter. It's just a matter of the willpower to do it. Right. And I, you know, I see that the the elements are all out there, it's just a matter of just pulling it all together to make it happen. Well Ed thank you so much for sharing your story. I hope we have inspired others to take your work even further. Again, your website is https://savedistemperdogs.com/ And definitely check it check out the book. It sounds like it's just gonna get people really excited with all of the positive stories. Well, by the way, I gotta I gotta tell you, yes, the book has the high it has the positive stories, but as the negative stories we have the successes and the failures, I want people to understand that I'm coming from a place of honesty with all this. I'm letting you know about all the all the failings that I had, but also the successes. There are I want somebody one critic one said something. it's incumbent upon me to talk about both the good outcomes and the bad outcomes and we do that and but the overall message Is that dogs don't have to die from this disease the way that they are now. And I don't like dogs dying from distemper. I don't like dogs dying at all. All right, Ed, well keep us posted. Thank you so much for being on and listeners take action if you can. SPONSOR AD Thanks again to the team at HAPPYBOND for sponsoring this episode. See why dog behaviorist, Cesar Milan also recommends this incredible formula by going to HappyBond.com and use the code WOL20 for 20% off. Thanks for listening. You'll find some helpful links in the show notes and if you enjoy the show, please be sure to follow and listen for free on your favorite podcast app. And please, please share your feedback. Visit WagOutLoud.com for great product recommendations with discounts, amazing online events and fantastic resources. That's also where to visit our Bark About it page where you can suggest topics, guests or products. Be advised that this show offers health or nutritional information and is designed for educational purposes only. You're encouraged to do your own research and should not rely on this information as a substitute for nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your dog's health, you should always consult a veterinarian or a nutrition expert. Have a tail wagging day and we'll catch you next time. Hey Winston was that another tail wagging episode?