This Wednesday, Jan. 3, would have been the 88th birthday of Dr. Alson Sears, who discovered how to use Newcastle Disease Vaccine to save dogs from canine distemper.
Dr. Sears wanted nothing more in life than to stop canine distemper. Although he lived to see a lot of progress made against this disease, he did not get to see his discovery of NDV serum tested in the early stages of the disease and published in a scientific, peer reviewed journal.
But we could still see that goal reached. We ask that anyone who had been helped by Dr. Sears and his treatments — or anyone who admired the man — to donate any amount, to honor his birthday and his life.
The money raised will be collected by Kind Hearts In Action and will
be put towards a new foundation in Dr. Sears’ name, which we hope will
someday defeat canine distemper.
In the meantime, we are also running a special promotion on the book, which will be available until Jan 7, 2024.
Thank you,
Ed Bond project director for Save Dogs From Distemper Kind Hearts In Action
Dr. Alson Sears wanted nothing more in life than to stop canine distemper. Although he lived to see a lot of progress made against this disease, he did not get to see his discovery of NDV serum tested in the early stages of the disease and published in a scientific, peer reviewed journal.
But we could still see that goal reached. We ask that anyone who had been helped by Dr. Sears and his treatments — or anyone who admired the man — to donate any amount, now.
The money raised will be collected by Kind Hearts In Action and will be put towards a new foundation in Dr. Sears’ name, which we hope will someday defeat canine distemper.
In the meantime, we are also running a special promotion on the book, which will be available for free until June 18, 2023.
Thank you,
Ed Bond project director for Save Dogs From Distemper Kind Hearts In Action
I received this email from Dr. Sears’ son, Skip, on Saturday:
“My Father passed away quietly at his home in Park City. 1/3/36-6/3/23. He had entered the hospital May 1, and had an aortic value replacement on May 8, he never really got a break after that. Just a slow decline. Your friendship and book meant the world to him and from his entire family, thank you. Best of luck in the future, Skip Sears”
We met in 1997, a few months after he had saved my dog’s life. As a then-reporter for the L.A. Times, I wanted to know how he did it. He was shy about having a spotlight placed on him because he had been burned in the past, but he finally agreed to an interview.
I drove up to the Sears Veterinary Clinic in Lancaster, California to have lunch with him and his wife Ruth. [Ruth died in October 2022]. He came out to the lobby to greet me. He was a big, friendly man in his early 60s with a full head of white hair. He held out his hand. “Call me Al,” he said as we shook hands. He spoke with a direct, country-wisdom, often punctuated with humor and a deep belly laugh.
This began an association with Dr. Sears that would outlast my relationship with the Los Angeles Times, my career in journalism, our residency in California, and even the lifetime of my dog, Galen, who he had saved. Meeting Dr. Sears changed my life in ways neither of us would have expected. Either out of an abundance of politeness or a desire to give him respect, I always called him “Dr. Sears.”
We changed each other because of hope. He taught me to have hope for dogs who the experts had deemed to be hopeless. He showed me repeatedly that dogs could be saved from canine distemper. Even though he lacked the expertise and contacts to get his discovery published in a scientific journal, the plain truth of what he had found became impossible for me to ignore. More than that, I had to do something about it.
As a non-scientist, I knew I had no place in advocating for an unpublished treatment. But when a vet in Romania followed Dr. Sears’ protocols [which I had posted on my little-known website] and found they had the same life-saving properties Dr. Sears had seen, I became a full-throated advocate. Doing nothing would cause harm. Doing nothing meant letting dogs die when I knew at least some of them could be saved.
Dr. Sears and I then spent years working together to record what he had done to the best of our abilities and spread the word about his treatments. More dogs were saved than lost, but the ultimate goal had always been to see some scientist put his NDV serum to the test to determine its effectiveness in saving the lives of dogs in the pre-neurologic stage of the disease. Then, the hope would have been to see those results published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
That would have been the most reliable path to acceptance. I believe that would have ultimately saved the lives of most dogs.
That still has not happened. He always knew it would be a long road to acceptance, a destination he likely would not reach in his lifetime.
“You know what? I’m going to be long gone by the time that this is accepted by my profession,” he said with a laugh in 2011. “I don’t expect it to be accepted within the next 10 years, OK? I’ve been playing with this for 50 years, and I still can’t get them interested. It boggles my mind.”
But in the years since we began our campaign, something else did happen. People began to have hope that their distemper dogs could be saved. They became more willing to try new techniques and more vets became more willing to support new treatments. Some dogs lived simply because the extra care gave them the time to eventually beat the virus. Some dog advocates have begun to push for further scientific research into how and why distemper dogs survive. This is all useful and encouraging.
But I still hold out the hope that someone will do a full and proper study of Dr. Sears’ NDV treatments and tell the world in no uncertain terms what they have found.
A short article I wrote about how I got into the canine distemper cause has been published in Mountain Home magazine, which serves central Pennsylvania and the Finger Lakes of Upstate New York, where I live: https://www.mountainhomemag.com/2021/12/01/375325/saving-dogs-from-distemper?
A doctor who had researched canine distemper sent me this video about the origins of the disease. I had heard of some of this, but this was an interesting point of view with perspectives I had not seen.
Received this email from Turkey this morning, along with the accompanying video:
Hello,
My name is Hatice Degirmenci and I am writing to you from Izmir, Turkey.
I am a shelter volunteer and a rescue worker in a small town outside of Izmir. Last summer, a young couple brought in a puppy that they found after it had just been crashed by a car. Hind back leg was broken, and the first vet they took him to, did an operation but unfortunately not the puppy vaccines.
The dog, named “Darky”, stayed at a dog boarding facility for a while and then I took him into my garden where I look after near 17 rescue dogs of all breeds and sizes, and ages.
After a couple of days, I noticed the twitches. He would be standing up and have the small jumpy twitch. I couldn’t believe a dog in my garden could start showing distemper virus symptoms at this stage.
I was in shock and denial for a couple of weeks.
Then the symptoms got more and more severe. At some point, Darky, lost control and feeling in both of his front legs. He was basically just dragging himself on his head/neck on the floow and back legs.
2,5 months into sleepless nights, muscle spasms getting worse and worse, Darky falling into his own pee and poop every day… one of our rescue friends mentioned Dr. Sears’ NDV Serum/Spinal Tap treatment. And in no time, we went to our vet and got the Spinal Tap done. She had tried it on a few patients before and got results.
It was a miracle. The harsh distemper symptoms started to decline. We did a lot of exercise for the front legs. And one day he started taking like 10-15 steps without falling.
He still has the spasms but he lives a fully normal life.
I CANT THANK YOU ENOUGH!!
Kind Regards
In a follow-up email, she added:
Your blog helped me thru the hardest days… I read and read and read and read and it gave me hopes. You’ve helped a dog and a family across thousands of kilometers.
THANK YOU, Hatice! You are a hero. Saving the life of one dog may not change the world, but it will change the world for that dog. Your email really made my day! — Ed
The recent article in Time magazine by Naomi Osaka: ‘It’s O.K. Not to Be O.K.’ was a welcome reminder that we all need to take care of our mental health. It’s an issue I needed to deal with in writing my book, and I’d wager it is something that everyone who fights to save a distemper dog must be aware of. We all need to take care of ourselves even when trying to help others.
Just received a new box of these books, first published a year ago.
In the spirit of sharing and lifting the stigmas of mental health, I’m sharing some of the excerpts from the book “Save Dogs From Distemper: The ‘Impossible’ Cure of Dr. Alson Sears.” These are struggles we all have.
[The first excerpt is from spring of 2013 …]
“For me, the daunting problems also fueled another issue I had been grappling with. At this point, I walked with cane and my foot in either a cast or a special boot. I had not regularly exercised since the injury in January 2012. Looking back at spring of 2013, I’ve come to realize I also had an undiagnosed injury: clinical depression.
“This book is supposed to be about canine distemper, but the depression does play a small role in the story. Since I believe that stigmas about mental health issues need to be dispelled, I’ll try to talk about it briefly and without being … depressing.
“Compared with many others, my experience with depression created only a temporary setback. My case is more like receiving a sharp injury that took a while to recover. More like that injury to my foot in the marathon. That foot injury had plagued me for years. By continually using my foot, the tendon could not recover. The point of the surgery was to repair the damage so that the foot could heal and get stronger. The mental injury also needed to be repaired so recovery could happen.
“The mental injury happened in the spring of 2010 when both my journalism and teaching careers had ended. In my brain, I had shrugged at this turn of events. ‘I’ll find something else.’ After all, this was possibly a chance to pursue my fiction writing. I was also glad to have the time to devote to a cause I cared about.
“But even though my brain shrugged, my emotions had their own reaction. Letting go of both of those careers had been a big blow to my identity. For 25 years, I had either been a journalist or a journalism teacher.
“Simply put, I was sad. This did not surprise me. No big deal. People have sad things happen to them all the time, and much worse than what I had. For example, Amy lost her dad and her sister within six months. So, my career setbacks do not come close to what she went through. However, a counselor later explained to me that after about two years, the sadness I still felt could change the chemistry in my brain. This makes it difficult to attempt tasks.
“For anyone who just says depression is “all in your head,” they are right. It is. But that doesn’t mean it is not real or that you can just “get over it.” Back in the 1980s, Rodney Dangerfield had a bit in his comedy routine where he talked about “The Heaviness.” He would say, “The heaviness is always there.” Now, I understand what he was talking about. Tasks and goals now came with an extra weight. I could feel them grow heavier as I approached them, as if slogging through a tar pit. Anxiety and self-esteem problems also go along with depression. It took great effort to make phone calls, and receiving phone calls from people I didn’t know or expect sent me into a tail-spin.
“Makes it difficult to be an advocate for a cause. I had fallen a long way from what I had been at the L.A. Times.
“As I write this, my feet are stronger than they had ever been. I can walk barefoot without pain. I can run or walk for an hour or more. I just played a game of badminton on my brother-in-law’s front lawn IN MY BARE FEET! And just as my feet could be fixed, so could my brain. The damage to my brain chemistry has been adjusted, and the heaviness has gone away. But diagnosis always comes first, and in spring of 2013, diagnosis remained more than two years away.”
[This next passage is from fall of 2014, when my buddy Jeff visited and I realized I had depression.]
“By the end of his visit, I realized I was happy. From that, I finally understood I’d been depressed for a long time, probably since the end of my journalism and teaching careers. To be honest, the thousands of emails I’d received about canine distemper also deepened the depression. More dogs were saved than lost, but many were lost. In the past five years or so, I’d received photos and videos of sick, dying and dead dogs from all over the world.
“Even though I always explained up front to people that I am not a vet or a doctor and could not possibly diagnose their dogs for them [something that cannot happen over email] I still got copies of lab reports and close-up photos of dry paw pads, dry eyes, poop, diarrhea and rashes. Sometimes owners would send me videos of operations, dogs in seizures, dogs spasming, shaking and scared. Photos of dead dogs on blankets, pillows and next to shallow graves landed in my Inbox.
“These owners needed to send these videos and photos because they were scared or grieving. They needed to express what they were going through and know that someone else understood without judging or blaming them. When our puppy Selkie died back in 1996, the vet who euthanized her admonished us afterwards, saying that we should make sure to get our next puppy vaccinated. That still pisses off Amy, the assumption being we had done something wrong to kill our puppy. We’d taken Selkie to our vet immediately for a checkup and vaccinations after adoption, but she had already been exposed.
“When a dog gets distemper that is not the time to admonish the owner. A distemper case does not always mean vaccination was neglected. The veterinarian and staff should remember that vaccinations do not always work, especially if the dog is somehow immune compromised. They should at least ask about the dog’s vaccination history before leaping to a conclusion.
“For whatever reason the dog got infected, it happened. It’s a fact that must now be handled. Do what you can to protect other dogs from infection. Most importantly, what you do have is a patient sick with a disease. What can be done now? The best time for the vaccination lesson is before (or at least when) the dog is adopted. If it is clear the owner of a distemper dog did miss the lesson on vaccination, you might find a compassionate way to let them know before they get away. But while I have your attention right now: Always get your dogs vaccinated!
“When someone writes to tell me their dog died, I sometimes tell them I still remember what it was like to have puppies die of distemper. Sometimes I skip that part because not everyone feels the loss the same way. So, it’s arrogant to assume you know what they are going through, how long the pain will last or whether a new pet will make things better. In my replies to these emails, I usually say some variation of ‘I’m so sorry for your loss. Distemper is a nasty disease that does not play fair. It is a terrible way to lose a good friend and family member. My hope for you is a future with happy, healthy dogs.’
“When I write these condolences, I remind myself of the joy of the dogs who have lived and the hope that someday perhaps dogs will no longer have to die of this disease. That’s what kept me going.
“The other weight that added to the depression was the unremitting silence. The unanswered phone calls and emails. The vets and scientists who refuse to even consider that distemper is a problem worth solving or that a solution is possible. I am aware of the dismissive criticisms online. I have no standing within the veterinary or scientific community, so I understand. Were I in your position I might say the same. But the universe gave me a choice: Do nothing and dogs would certainly die. Do something and perhaps some could be saved. Do something, and maybe canine distemper would stop being such a deadly disease.
“So in December 2008, I chose to do something. I chose to try. I made that choice because I don’t like dogs dying when they don’t have to.
“Recognizing the depression broke the hold it had over me. I quickly realized the anxiety and self-esteem issues that came with it and began to deal with those. When I felt dread as I approached a task, I recognized what was going on and fought to overcome it. In the next few months, I gradually got better but I would eventually decide I did not have the power to completely defeat the depression on my own. I’d need a little help.
[This passage is from a year later when I finally went to get help.]
“A blog post on another website changed my life for the better. Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley Crusher on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” had posted a video online describing a panic attack he’d had at an airport. In that moment, his wife helped him realize he had a mental health issue. In his video, he explained how those with depression, anxiety and other issues could get help.
He helped me realize that although I had come a long way to climb out of the depression, I couldn’t quite get all the way out of the hole without a little help. So, I went to counseling. The counselor had me get a prescription from my doctor. With the medication, counseling, much longer walks with Romeo at night and the music of Brandi Carlile, I began to climb out of the hole. Brandi taught me to feel joy despite the regrets of the past and to not let others tear me down.”
Today I believe I have overcome the bout with depression. I have learned to believe in myself because others believe in me. As Naomi Osaka says, you can’t please everyone. I have learned to see the truth and value of those who would criticize me. I try to learn and grow from that point of view, but without letting it tear me down.
