palm beach county rabies law

[malernee]

http://www.pbcgov.com/PubSafety/animal/page10.htm

SECTION 10. RABIES VACCINATIONS.

A. Every person who is the owner of any dog or cat shall have such animal vaccinated against rabies with a vaccine approved by the United States Department of Agriculture by three (3) months of age, but no later than four (4) months of age. The duration of the vaccination shall be according to the approved label accompanying the vaccine as it applies to the particular species and age of the dog or cat.

B. Every person who visits the county with any dog or cat for a period of thirty (30) calendar days or less shall be deemed in compliance with this section by furnishing a current, valid certificate of rabies vaccination issued in accordance with the laws of the jurisdiction in which they permanently reside. Dogs and cats without a current certificate of rabies vaccination must receive a rabies inoculation and be issued a county vaccination certificate.

C. Every dog or cat that is relocated to the county for a period of more than thirty (30) calendar days, must have a current valid certificate of rabies vaccination. The information contained on that certificate must be substantially the same as the Palm Beach County rabies vaccination certificate or the dog and/or cat owner must secure a rabies vaccination and a Palm Beach County certificate of vaccination.

D. Evidence of a rabies vaccination shall consist of a fully completed county rabies vaccination certificate signed by the veterinarian administering the vaccine. The Division shall provide the certificates to be used by the veterinarians. One (1) copy of the certificate shall be retained by the veterinarian for at least one (1) year after the vaccination expires and the other copies shall be distributed to the owner and Animal Care and Control as directed by the Division.

[whistle blower]

SECTION 11. DOG AND CAT RABIES/LICENSE TAGS.

A. Adult dogs and cats

1. Every person who is the owner of any adult dog or cat shall secure from the Division or an authorized veterinarian/clinic an adult dog or cat rabies/license tag. The Division shall provide suitable tags for sale through authorized veterinarians/clinics.

2. No adult rabies/license tag for dogs or cats shall be issued or renewed until evidence of vaccination for rabies by a licensed veterinarian has been presented. Upon vaccinating a dog or cat against rabies, authorized veterinarians/clinics shall have available for purchase by the dog or cat owner, a Palm Beach County rabies/license tag. The rabies/license tag shall be valid for one (1) year from the date of vaccination and must be renewed annually. No adult rabies/license tag shall be valid after the expiration of the rabies vaccination, regardless of the date of issuance.

3. Failure to secure and purchase a new adult tag within thirty (30) calendar days after the previous tag expires will result in a late penalty. The Board is hereby authorized to establish by resolution the cost for the late penalty.

4. All adult dogs shall be required to wear a valid county tag, except as provided for in Laws of Florida, Chapter 69-1432, Section 1. Any person to whom a tag has been issued shall cause the tag to be securely fastened about the dog's neck by a collar, harness or other substantial device so as to be clearly visible at all times. Dogs housed in a secure enclosure may be exempt from wearing the required tag while kept in the enclosure, as long as the tag is securely fastened to a collar/harness and that device is attached to the enclosure. Dogs participating in a registered field trial, obedience trial and confirmation show and/or match are not required to wear such tags during the time of the event.

5. All adult cats shall be required to:

a. Wear a valid Palm Beach County tag, except as provided for in Laws of Florida, Chapter 69-1432, Section 1. Any person to whom a tag has been issued shall cause the tag to be securely fastened about the cat's neck by a collar, harness or other substantial device so as to be clearly visible at all times; or

b. Be tattooed on the inside right ear with a number that is not to exceed six (6) digits. Such number shall be tattooed at the owner's sole expense. Each number is to be at least one-quarter inch (1/4") in height and be clearly visible. Such number is to be provided by the owner on all official county vaccination and tag certificates; or

c. Be implanted with an electronic animal identification device (EAID).

6. Every person who owns an adult dog or cat in the county shall be required to secure a dog or cat rabies/license tag pursuant to the following schedule:

a. Within thirty (30) calendar days after becoming an adult; or

b. Within thirty (30) calendar days after a juvenile tag expires; or

c. Within thirty (30) calendar days of acquiring a dog or cat; or

d. Within thirty (30) calendar days after entering the jurisdiction of this Ordinance.

7. All authorized veterinarians/clinics shall have Palm Beach County rabies/license tags available for purchase by dog or cat owners or their agents who present evidence to the veterinarian that the dog or cat has been vaccinated against rabies pursuant to Section 10 - RABIES VACCINATIONS. For a one (1) year vaccination, the effective date of the license tag shall be the date on which the dog or cat was last vaccinated against rabies. For a three (3) year vaccination, the effective date will be one (1) and two (2) years following the date of vaccination. In no case shall the rabies/license tag be effective for more than one (1) year.

B. Juvenile dogs and cats

1. Every person or entity that is the owner of a juvenile dog or cat shall secure a juvenile license tag from the Division, an authorized veterinarian/clinic or an authorized representative. The Division shall provide suitable juvenile tags for sale through an authorized veterinarian/clinic or authorized representatives.

2. Every person or entity that obtains a juvenile license tag shall have the dog or cat vaccinated against rabies by three (3) months of age, but no later than four (4) months of age. The juvenile tag shall expire fourteen (14) months from the date of issuance if the owner obtains a rabies vaccination before the animal becomes an adult. Failure to obtain a rabies vaccination before four (4) months of age will void the juvenile tag after the dog or cat is an adult. In such cases, the owner must obtain an adult license. After the fourteen (14) month period, all owners of dogs and cats with juvenile license tags must comply with the adult license tag requirements.

3. No person shall be issued a juvenile tag for any animal over four (4) months of age.

4. Failure to secure and purchase a new adult tag within thirty (30) calendar days after the juvenile tag expires will result in a late penalty. The Board is hereby authorized to establish by resolution the cost for the late penalty.

5. All authorized veterinarians/clinics and authorized representatives shall have Palm Beach County juvenile license tags available for purchase by dog and cat owners or their agents.

C. All authorized veterinarians/clinics and authorized representatives shall remit payment for rabies/license tags sold according to procedures established by the Division. All authorized veterinarians/clinics and representatives are encouraged to issue one (1) business check monthly for rabies/license tags sold. Failure to follow the procedures established by the Division will result in the requirement that a business check from the authorized entity be issued to the Division on a monthly basis. A monthly rabies/license tag report form for purposes of tabulating tags sold and amount owed shall be supplied by the Division.

D. Schedule of fees and payments

The Board is hereby authorized to establish by resolution:

1. A schedule of fees for all license tag costs.

2. A schedule of payments or handling fees to authorized veterinarians/clinics and representatives who participate in the sale of dog and cat license tags.

E. General license tag requirements for adult and juvenile dogs and cats

1. The address of the owner shall be presumed to be the abode of the dog or cat. All changes of address must be reported to the Division within thirty (30) calendar days following such change.

2. Any changes of ownership of any dog or cat, be it by sale, transfer or otherwise, shall be reported in writing to the Division by the original or new owner within thirty (30) calendar days after ownership changes.



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© 2003 Palm Beach County Board of County Commissioners. Last modified: 03/22/2003 10:20 AM. Disclaimer

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J Wildl Dis. 1990 Oct;26(4):473-85. Related Articles, Links


Surveillance and epidemiologic mapping of monoclonal antibody-defined J Wildl Dis. 1990 Oct;26(4):473-85. Related Articles, Links


Surveillance and epidemiologic mapping of monoclonal antibody-defined rabies variants in Florida.

Smith JS, Yager PA, Bigler WJ, Hartwig EC Jr.

Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, Georgia 30333.

Brain tissues from 128 rabid animals from Florida in 1987 and 1988 were analyzed with monoclonal antibodies and cases were mapped by species and antigenic variant. The single variant found in terrestrial animals was distinguished easily from the variety of antigenic variants identified for infected bats, and there was no evidence of transmission of rabies between bats and terrestrial animals. The raccoon (Procyon lotor) appeared to be the sole maintenance source for terrestrial animal rabies in Florida.

PMID: 2250324 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE.

Smith JS, Yager PA, Bigler WJ, Hartwig EC Jr.

Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, Georgia 30333.

Brain tissues from 128 rabid animals from Florida in 1987 and 1988 were analyzed with monoclonal antibodies and cases were mapped by species and antigenic variant. The single variant found in terrestrial animals was distinguished easily from the variety of antigenic variants identified for infected bats, and there was no evidence of transmission of rabies between bats and terrestrial animals. The raccoon (Procyon lotor) appeared to be the sole maintenance source for terrestrial animal rabies in Florida.

PMID: 2250324 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE

[skyranger]

CDC Vaccine Data Leads Scientists to Shocking Discovery


The Institute of Medicine held a meeting to review research that has been found, which links thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative in vaccines, and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. The panel used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions (CDC) Vaccine Datalink, which concluded that children who are given three thimerosal-containing vaccines are 27 times more likely to develop autism than children who receive thimerosol-free vaccines.

Thimerosal has been gradually removed from vaccines since 1999, however it is still present in some vaccinations, including virtually all flu shots.

During the review, medical experts discussed the results from a study that showed urinary mercury concentrations were six times higher in children with autism, as opposed to normal-age/vaccine matched controls. They also said that they found evidence that suggested the link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism had a higher risk than that between lung cancer and smoking cigarettes.

Yahoo! News February 9, 2004

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American Academy of Pediatrics
Dedicated to the Health of All Children


Study fails to show a connection between thimerosal and autism

The American Academy of Pediatrics provides the following information for clinicians who may be aware of recent press surrounding an article that claims to show a correlation between thimerosal and autism.1 This paper uses data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) inappropriately and contains numerous conceptual and scientific flaws, omissions of fact, inaccuracies, and misstatements.
The most important weakness of the article is the reliance on VAERS data to draw conclusions about adverse event associations or causality. VAERS is a passive surveillance system for reporting possible vaccine adverse events that depends on health care professionals, patients, and others to file reports. Health effects reported to VAERS as being associated with vaccines may represent true adverse events, coincidental occurrences, or mistakes in filing. Inherent limits of VAERS include incomplete reporting, lack of verification of diagnoses, and lack of data on people who were immunized and did not report problems. Data from VAERS are useful for hypothesis generation (raising questions) but should not be used for research aimed at determining whether vaccines cause certain health problems (hypothesis proving), as was done in the article by Geier and Geier. For example, VAERS worked well to quickly alert investigators to the possibility of intussusception after rotavirus immunization but could not prove the association. Proof required numerous controlled studies to document the nature and frequency of this association.

The original concern regarding thimerosal in vaccines was sparked not by any trends identified in the VAERS system after 70 years of experience with thimerosal use as a vaccine preservative but by theoretic concerns about total exposures infants might receive from all mercury sources in the environment, including vaccines. Research to date involving refined, controlled studies in large populations of patients has failed to demonstrate any association between vaccines that may have used thimerosal as a preservative and neurodevelopmental disorders including autism. The authors failed to acknowledge the inherent limitations of the VAERS database when drawing conclusions of adverse event associations contained in this report and their other publications. They are equally unclear as to how their data were generated, thus preventing accurate review of their methods and replication of their outcomes.

Other flaws in the article include the following:
* The law relating to VAERS reporting is misstated. Most VAERS-reported conditions fall into a category in which voluntary and passive, not mandatory or required, events after immunization are recorded. Only a specific set of more severe adverse events are specified as mandatory under the Vaccine Injury Table, and even then, reporting is inconsistent.
* Conclusions of the 2001 Institute of Medicine Immunization Safety Review Committee report2 as to what constitutes maximal permissible dose exposures to mercury are misinterpreted, and misleading statements are made concerning federal safety guidelines for mercury exposure levels that might be expected to cause harm.
* The authors fail to depict accurately the differences between pharmacokinetics of and exposure to methylmercury (found in contaminated food) and ethylmercury (found in thimerosal) and make unsubstantiated assumptions about the risks of the route of exposure (ingested versus injected).
* Adult heart disease is included as a possible thimerosal-related condition, although heart arrest reports in very young children are used in the analysis. Heart arrest in very young children (a common term used on pediatric death certificates and often unrelated to the actual cause of death) has nothing to do with adult coronary heart disease. The authors’ implication that thimerosal in vaccines is a cause of acute cardiotoxic events is unfounded in any scientific or clinical reports and represents a misuse of the terminology found in VAERS reports.
* The authors fail to reveal how thimerosal exposure was calculated—a critical omission, because much of the data required to estimate mercury exposure are not available in VAERS reports. The authors’ stated estimates of exposure attributable to diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis combination vaccines (DTaP or DTwP) do not add up. Some DTaP vaccines never contained thimerosal as a preservative, and any child may have received 1 or more DTaP doses, which would have resulted in no ethylmercury exposure.
* The authors claim to have analyzed data from biologic surveillance summaries by manufacturers, although data regarding specific manufacturers (some of which incorporated thimerosal as a preservative and some of which did not) and age and year of birth of vaccine recipients are not available in the publication cited. Data as to the number of patients receiving vaccines with thimerosal plus the number of doses of vaccine actually received by patients versus total doses of vaccine manufactured cannot be derived from biologic surveillance summaries, making the authors’ claims for baselines of actual vaccine use untenable.
* Calculations for incidence rates and relative risk, which require information (age or year of birth) that is not available from biologic surveillance data, are not shown.
* An appropriate comparison is not made between thimerosal exposure and no thimerosal exposure, which is not possible using VAERS data, because one cannot be sure whether a child received a thimerosal-containing vaccine at any point before the event for which the VAERS report was created. Depending on the manufacturer, many of the children listed in VAERS reports could have received all vaccines that were free of thimerosal.
* Statistical methodology for calculating the relative risk and correlation coefficients is not stated.
* The authors claim to have performed their own analysis of a Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) thimerosal screening study (reference 17 in Geier and Geier), although the raw data needed to perform an independent analysis are not available in the document cited. (Note: neither the original preliminary VSD study of thimerosal and neurodevelopmental disorders nor any of the follow-up expanded studies identified a “signal” indicating any association between thimerosal and autism.)
* The authors claim that data for thimerosal exposure and autism risk follow an exponential distribution, although none of the thimerosal exposure categories had a significantly increased risk of autism. The figures used are confusing and not supported by an adequate explanation as to how they were constructed. Comparing the occurrence of late onset, chronic conditions like autism by using acute vaccine reactions like fever, pain, and vomiting (presumably attributable to other vaccine components) as controls makes no sense as a measure of relative adverse event rates.
* When comparing early (1984-1985) to late (1990-1994) birth cohorts, the authors make arbitrary and unlikely assumptions of possible thimerosal exposure for both groups that are contrary to when thimerosal vaccines were introduced and what their expected pattern of use in the private and public sector was. The average level of thimerosal exposure claimed by the authors is not realistic.
* The authors claim high correlation coefficients for thimerosal with certain neurologic disabilities without describing the statistical methods used, which makes the results highly unreliable.
* The authors fail to note that a recently published review by Nelson and Bauman3 casts doubt on the biologic plausibility of symptom similarities between mercury poisoning and autism.
* The authors claim falsely that children in the United States in 2003 may be exposed to higher levels of mercury from thimerosal contained in childhood immunizations than any time in the past, when in fact, all routinely recommended infant vaccines currently sold in the United States are free of thimerosal as a preservative and have been for more than 2 years (www.fda.gov/cber/vaccine/thimerosal.htm#1).

No scientific data link thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines with any pediatric neurologic disorder, including autism. Despite this, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Academy of Pediatrics, National Institutes of Health, and US Public Health Service have continued to investigate this issue to put theoretic concerns about this mercury-containing compound to rest. Thimerosal continues to be used widely as a vaccine preservative in many other parts of the world where economics and sanitation concerns mandate an effective means to safeguard vaccines from contamination when stored in bulk in multidose vials. Any scientific article that can prove a thimerosal link to significant adverse events in children must be published in respected and widely read journals because of the great general interest today in vaccine safety. These journals can be expected to apply the highest standards of critical peer review to the results of any research that purports the existence of these associations and claims of causality.

1. Geier MR, Geier DA. Thimerosal in childhood vaccines, neurodevelopment disorders and heart disease in the United States. J Am Physicians Surg. 2003;8:6-11
2. Institute of Medicine, Immunization Safety Review Committee. Immunization Safety Review: Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Stratton K, Gable A, McCormick M, eds. Washington, DC: National Academies Press; 2001
3. Nelson KB, Bauman ML. Thimerosal and autism? Pediatrics. 2003;111:674-679

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Telegraph (UK)
MMR research scientists retract link with autism
By Celia Hall, Medical Editor
(Filed: 04/03/2004)

Ten scientists who worked on the research that triggered the MMR scare now
say that there is no association between the triple jab and autism in
children.

Thirteen co-authors wrote the paper published in The Lancet in 1998, led by
Andrew Wakefield, who has been at the heart of the controversy ever since.

One of the scientists could not be traced and one other, Peter Harvey,
together with Dr Wakefield, did not sign the researchers' retraction.

The 10, working for or attached to the Royal Free Hospital, London, or its
medical school at the time, said in a statement yesterday: "We wish to make
it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between the MMR
vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient. However the possibility of
a link was raised and consequent events have had major implications for
public health.

"We consider now is the appropriate time that we should together formally
retract the interpretation placed upon these findings in the paper."

The controversy over the vaccine caused a collapse in parents' confidence in
the MMR programme. Vaccination rates fell to 60 per cent in some areas with
demands for the vaccine to be given in a single injection.

The Government has refused to license single vaccines and insists that the
MMR jab is safe. Meanwhile, thousands of parents have paid to have their
children given a single injection privately.

The scientists say that the main part of the paper that presented findings
of a new type of bowel disease in autistic children remains valid and that
further evidence has been found to support this.

"We believe it important that such work continues as autistic children can
potentially be helped by recognition and treatment of gastrointestinal
problems," they say.

Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, calls on the Government to put
£12.5 million into autism research and for a council of research integrity
to be set up to investigate "serious allegations of research misconduct".

Last month allegations were made that the part of the research relating to
MMR and autism had been flawed by a conflict of interest.

Dr Horton said he accepted that there had been a conflict of interest
because of work Dr Wakefield was conducting for the Legal Aid Board.

c Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.