Part of the routine “booster” vaccination given to your dog each year protects against a disease called Leptospirosis or Weil’s Disease. This is a disease that can be acquired from other dogs or from wild rodents or water contaminated by faeces and urine (probably the most common route of infection). It is a serious disease causing substantial liver and kidney damage and is usually fatal. It is also a zoonosis (can also be passed to humans). The Leptospira organism comes in several variants (called serovars). Until recently the main variants in the UK were L. icterohaemorrhagica and L. canicola and these were the serovars present in the vaccine. New serovars have emerged in Europe and have been spreading particularly L. bratislava and L. grippotyphosa. The former has now been identified in the UK and it is expected that the latter will eventually spread to the UK. MSD have now upgraded their vaccine to include these new emerging strains and we have now switched to using the new vaccine which should offer good protection against these new serovars. This will now be included as part of your dog’s yearly “booster”. Although the new vaccine is more expensive than the previous one we are absorbing the increase and the price of the annual booster remains unchanged. However, dogs that have not been given this new vaccine before will require a second dose 4 weeks later to give full protection against these new strains.