The project was focused on bacteria and viruses that can contribute to bovine respiratory disease (BRD). It found antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in just two per cent of sampled calves from 27 herds throughout the four western provinces.

Only three calves were found hosting microbes resistant to more than two types of antimicrobials.

The results are consistent with similar research, wrote lead researcher and University of Saskatchewan professor Cheryl Waldner in an email. However, her study had more focus on sampling on the farm of origin, before feedlot entry, than on other projects.

“Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) is one of the most important causes of sickness and death loss in beef cattle, both in cow-calf herds and in feedlots,” she said.

Pneumonia is the most common issue producers will see in their herds, she added, and understanding the bacteria and viruses at the root of the infection can help prevent illness through vaccination, or set up the producer for success if it does occur.

“We can provide better advice for treating calves that get sick near the time of weaning,” she said. “It further helps us design programs to best use the vaccines we have to prevent respiratory disease in the beef industry and to identify gaps where we might need new vaccines.”

Waldner’s research team is also looking at bacteria and viruses present in calves upon arrival at the feedlot and how those organisms change once calves are on feed.

“Again, this information can be used to help beef producers and veterinarians inform respiratory disease management, including vaccination and antibiotic use.”

Details

The project had four main objectives. They included quantifying current cow-calf antibiotic resistance in respiratory pathogens through traditional culture techniques, assessing potential association between antibiotic use in cow-calf herds and antibiotic resistance in BRD pathogens in calves before entering the feedlot, and evaluating emerging tools to potentially improve cost-effective surveillance.

They also hoped to identify any management practices that could make finding specific BRD bacteria or viruses more likely.

“Management factors such as calving earlier, more confinement of animals at calving and handling cow-calf pairs more often can be associated with an increased risk of BRD,” she said.

“These producers would be most likely to benefit from working with their veterinarians to review their vaccination programs for BRD, especially in mother cows and nursing calves.”

Researchers also tried to find management practices that could be linked with antimicrobial resistance development in BRD pathogens found in calves. “However, the occurrence of AMR was so low that there wasn’t enough data to examine this question,” Waldner said.

They started by collecting nasal swabs from 26 calves at or near weaning in most of the 27 participating herds. These samples were cultured in the lab to identify respiratory pathogens.

Those pathogens were then tested for antimicrobial resistance through standard techniques. The resistance found was then compared to what had been previously reported for cow-calf herds and feedlot cattle in Western Canada.

Metagenomic sequencing was performed on some of the samples. This technique expands the range of bacteria and viruses researchers can test for.

In this case, it was used to describe additional respiratory bacteria of interest, antimicrobial resistance genes in those bacteria, genes associated with bacterial serotype (groups of micro-organisms with similar surface structures), and respiratory viruses.

“The metagenomic sequencing tools we used in this study looked for DNA and RNA from a wide variety of organisms that can potentially cause disease,” Waldner said. “This approach has some advantages over traditional laboratory tests as it allows us to look for many different types of bacteria or viruses with a single test.”

The analysis also helps indicate how likely those organisms are to cause disease, she noted.

The project was funded by the Alberta Beef Producers, Beef Cattle Research Council, the Canadian Beef Cattle Check-Off, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture.

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Vaccination is a proven tool for disease prevention, but in Western Canada, one in 10 producers surveyed are not vaccinating their cows for infectious bovine rhinotracheitis (IBR) and bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVD).

As well, more than a quarter of producers do not vaccinate cows for other reproductive diseases.

This leaves herds vulnerable.

Why vaccinate for BVD?

When a cow is infected with BVD in early pregnancy, offspring may be born persistently infected. These animals are generally considered to be the primary source for transmission of the virus.

BVD infection can lead to poor conception rates and both BVD and IBR can cause abortions in cattle. Blood tests show exposure to these diseases is common in unvaccinated herds. Several experimental trials found these vaccines are effective with an average decrease of 85 per cent in fetal infection, a 45 per cent decrease in abortions and a five per cent increase in pregnancy rates in BVD-vaccinated herds.

The Cost Benefit of BVD Vaccinations tool (visit the ‘Tools’ page here) allows producers to input their herd size, expected price, animal weights, cost of vaccine and labour to see the potential savings from vaccinating cattle for BVD specifically from changes in reproductive performance caused by abortions.

Why vaccinate for BRD?

Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) is one of the costliest health issues facing the beef industry. While a lot of research has been focused at the feedlot stage, the disease is also the most common cause of death for nursing calves older than three weeks. BRD can impact any producer, including those who retain ownership of their calves to background, feed or finish cattle.

U.S. researchers tracking the annual incidence of BRD in pre-weaned calves over a 20-year period found that the annual incidence varied from a low of three per cent to a high of 24 per cent with an overall annual average of 11 per cent. On average, the mortality rate of calves suffering from pre-weaning BRD was 13 per cent.

Once calves are affected by BRD, there are both immediate and long-lasting effects on performance. Studies have shown that calves challenged by BRD could weigh up to 36 pounds less at weaning.

Vaccinating can help producers manage the disease, enhance animal welfare and reduce the need for antibiotics whether they are backgrounding or finishing a few cattle of their own, retaining ownership of their calves for a longer period of time, or simply wanting to create a reputation for supplying quality calves. While it may seem like the main beneficiary of BRD vaccines are feedlots purchasing vaccinated calves, other segments benefit as well.

The Cost-Benefit of Feeding BRD Vaccinated Calves tool allows producers to input their own numbers of feeder cattle purchased (or retained), feeder and fed price, weight, cost of gain, days on feed and treatment cost to calculate and compare the expense of feeding calves that have not been vaccinated for BRD. The tool itemizes costs including death loss, treatment costs, and performance losses due to lower average daily gain and lower-quality grades, that arise from feeding calves that were not vaccinated.

The BRD vaccination cost benefit and BVD vaccination cost benefit calculators, along with other production tools, can be found at beefresearch.ca.

The post The bottom line on vaccinating cows appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Knowing the history of the calves regarding weaning time, distance transported, vaccination, and health history — as well as upcoming weather conditions — will help you determine the level of risk. Each pen or group of calves needs to be independently assigned a risk category — ranging from low risk to ultra-high risk — in order to determine how they should be handled.

The overall goal is to prevent a disease outbreak and high death loss by implementing management changes so you will get top performance from your calves.

If we can determine the risk level ahead of time that gives us a hand up in battling the respiratory and other pathogens we know the calves may be exposed to. The final step is making the economic calculation of preventive cost in terms of vaccines, labour, or metaphylactic (mass medication) antibiotics versus treatment and potentially higher death loss. As with most things in farming, this is a gamble and, of course, there are always unknowns that can blindside us.

In bringing in calves or, for that matter, feeding your own calves, there are many factors which increase risk and we need to manage or handle these as best as we can. Try and ask yourself the question ahead of time: ‘What is the risk level of this group of calves for developing respiratory disease and is there any management changes I need to make to mitigate or minimize this risk?’

Calves at high risk of developing BRD are generally considered to be those presenting with one or more of these points:

1) They have been commingled because they came from an auction market or were mixed at home. Once a group has settled, avoid adding in more calves. Filling a pen with animals from as minimal a number of original owners as possible is better.

2) Extended transport times where calves become stressed and dehydrated. Loading and unloading create the highest level of stress. In my opinion, when calves are transported huge distances — such as from another province — it tips them into the ultra-high-risk category. The more local we can source cattle, the better. However, that is often not possible as very often calves are raised and fed in two totally different areas of the country. In that case, think of using electrolytes solutions (such as DeStress) before transporting long distances.

3) Bad weather or wide temperature swings can create severe stress. Watching the weather channel may help, but you need to buy when you can. The farther the distance travelled, the more likely these temperature fluctuations are going to happen.

4) The on-arrival procedures (such as castration, dehorning, and branding) all have their stressors. The cattle industry is always under scrutiny from an animal welfare perspective for these procedures and in the majority of cases, castration is done way ahead of weaning. Polled bulls are eliminating horns or the calves are dehorned early, while dehorning in the feedlot these days generally involves tipping the few horns that are left. If financial institutions, feeder associations, and grazing reserves did not require branding, there would be little done anymore. If you need to brand, minimize size and number of characters as much as possible. Better analgesics (painkillers) and anti-inflammatory drugs are being commonly administered, and that will help minimize stress in these painful situations.

5) Calves recently weaned with no or a poor (unknown) vaccination history. The old preconditioned programs where calves have already been weaned a month is ideal. The more protection from respiratory pathogens, the better. This would include the viral as well as the bacterial components of the BRD complex. Don’t forget the clostridials and histophilus in your vaccination protocols.

6) Lightweight calves or nutritionally compromised or parasitized — internal parasites suppress the immune system — may also carry an additional level of risk. For me, calves under 400 pounds would be considered ultra-high risk. For the four- to five-weight calves high risk and above 600 pounds, it depends on the other categories above as to how their risk was assessed. Veterinarians will vary in their opinions here.

If calves fall into any one of the above categories they are considered high risk. Low risk are essentially your own calves — pre-immunized and weaned at home into a situation where they know where feed and water are. Weaning in older, heavier calves and weaning in good weather with either fenceline or some other type of soft weaning is considered low risk. It is ideal to remove the cows from the calves and that they are used to the ration they will be fed. Even in these situations, pulls for respiratory disease can climb and you reach a point where treating them with antibiotics may become necessary to thwart an outbreak.

With high-risk calves then, the dilemma is what to do when you get them. Your herd veterinarian will have a protocol for what he or she believes is best and, again, it may vary pen to pen. Most would consider giving the necessary vaccinations and processing and covering with metaphylactic antibiotics. The newer macrolide antibiotics last a long time in the lungs and they are in a completely different family than our treatment antibiotics. Usually the label states for the control of BRD or to use in cattle at high risk of developing BRD.

This is where knowing the risk level of the calves coming into your feeding pen is critical. In the past, antibiotics were given in the feed but they needed to be given for a long period of time and are hard to manage in large feedlots in order to avoid residues.

The macrolide antibiotics come with a cost, so this is where the risk/benefit comes in (and labour has to be factored into the equation as well).

Our experience has shown us that by assessing the pens and using the appropriate vaccination, deworming, and metaphylactic treatment protocols, BRD can be drastically reduced. In the future, other antimicrobial treatments as well as earlier detection of BRD and even more comprehensive vaccine programs will hopefully reduce mortality and morbidity even further.

The post Beef 911: Assess the risk when bringing in calves appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

That was the message from veterinarian Cody Creelman during a recent Beef Cattle Research Centre webinar.

Preconditioning includes anything a producer does to a weaned calf that reduces shrink and chance of illness or death when it arrives at the feedlot, said Creelman of Veterinary Agri-Health Services in Airdrie. It can range from a single blackleg shot to a comprehensive herd health program that includes vaccination, top-quality nutrition, and a host of best management practices.

“If I was a producer, I would make sure that I knew my input costs as best as I possibly could,” said Creelman. “I could figure out which preconditioning system was going to fit my individual system of raising cattle. I would consult with veterinarians, nutritionists and marketing consultants and find a system that works for me. Feedlots do want these types of cattle.”

When calves between 500 to 700 pounds hit the feedlot, they generally receive antibiotics, vaccines to protect against respiratory and bacterial pathogens, and treatments for parasites.

The vaccines and antibiotics typically cost $30 per head (plus $12 in labour), but because feedlot operators don’t know the history of the cattle, they want to ensure they remain healthy.

• More on the Manitoba Co-operator: Should you precondition your cattle?

Calves have a five per cent chance of catching bovine respiratory disease (BRD) — also known as shipping fever — which will cut their daily gain by nearly a pound per day compared to other calves. But cow-calf producers can reduce the incidence of the disease and mortality at the feedlot by giving a respiratory pathogen vaccine any time between branding and three weeks before weaning. Some pharmaceutical companies guarantee “zero per cent BRD pulls” when their vaccine is used, and will compensate feedlots if a cow becomes sick and has to be pulled from its pen for treatment, said Creelman. The net effect is reduced antibiotic use and mortality, and increased feed efficiency and beef quality, he said.

“There’s also an increase in animal welfare and consumer perception of the industry,” he said. “All of this data is out there showing what preconditioned calves can do when they hit the feedlot.”

Reducing the risk of antibiotic strains of the disease is another big reason for preconditioning, he said.

“I do not look forward to the day when antibiotics do not work as well as they did. So we have to do more than we’re doing in our current system,” said Creelman.

And there’s no reason not to precondition calves, he said.

“You’re running those calves through for branding anyway, so why not give them all the vaccines they need to be preconditioned? Then when they get vaccinated at the feedlot, that acts as a boost, not a primary vaccine.”

Another part of preconditioning is to ensure calves are acquainted with feed bunks and water troughs.

“They can’t just go to the feedlot and wander around lost until they just one day bump into the feed bunk,” he said.

As well, producers should be ensuring their feed is high quality and, if need be, consulting with a nutritionist to learn more about the minerals.

“You can get up to three pounds of gain a day at home. It may take a bit of practice to get that, but if you can achieve that, that’s a lot of salable pounds at 30, 45 or 60 days that will put some extra cash in your jeans,” said Creelman.

He also recommended low-stress weaning and direct marketing to the feedlot.

“Decreasing the bug soup and kindergarten effect of going through the auction mart system can be a viable option when it comes to management as well,” he said.

Still, producers aren’t guaranteed a premium for the extra work involved in preconditioning. But if they don’t, cow-calf producers are just passing risk on to the feedlot, said Creelman.

“Even though we’re in the same industry, I feel like there’s a lot of us versus them out there,” he said. “There’s a lot of mistrust. For the good of the animal, we need to pull back together and work together to improve consumer perception.”

And while preconditioning information may not always be passed along to the buyer right now, that may soon change. Traceability programs, certified preconditioning, and electronic video auctions can all help ensure that information about preconditioning stays with the animal throughout the value chain, he said.

Producers can also sell directly to the feedlot, and build up a good relationship with the feedlot owner.

“Even with tools like BIXS, you can extract your carcass data out and then extract the personalized data to leverage buyers in subsequent years,” he said.

The post Preconditioned calves pay big dividends after decades appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

It and a couple of strains of rotavirus are the two main viruses we see in our scours vaccines. (It also causes a winter dysentery bloody diarrhea in mature cattle, especially housed dairy cattle in the winter.) What you also may not have known is this same virus can be involved in the bovine respiratory disease complex.

The respiratory syndrome is often masked by the other much more prominent viruses such as IBR and BRSV or the main bacterial causes of pneumonia that being Mannheimia Hemolytica, Pasteurella Multocida and finally Histophilus Somnus. Often it may be involved with the respiratory disease complex with these other components, but is generally less serious. There is no respiratory vaccine on the market that has the corona virus antigen in it, but in the future — as the vaccines become broader and broader spectrum — a company may put in the corona virus to bolster the immunity to more respiratory pathogens once again.

Respiratory disease is the No. 1 economic disease in feedlots across Canada so anything we can do to reduce cases is beneficial. Cattle have a lot less lung capacity than other species but the big rumen and digestive process require a lot more oxygen. So technically the lungs have very little reserve in them, and that leads to more issues with respiratory disease.

A few separate outbreaks of corona virus respiratory disease have occurred and you generally see some slight depression, but overall animals will still look bright. There may be increased nasal secretions and feed intake may go down significantly. In fact, it may be this feed decrease is the first thing that is experienced. One still has to treat the sick calves for secondary bacterial infection. It can also occur if there is suppression of the immune system because of vitamin or mineral deficiency, internal parasites or a concurrent disease. You may even have some cattle infected with corona and have the enteric form as well. You would then expect to have diarrhea accompany some of the other clinical signs in a small percentage of infected cattle.

So if a group of cattle seems to be sicker than in the past — in spite of vaccinating for pneumonia — have them checked out, as the corona virus may be the culprit.

Another bacterial cause of pneumonia presents itself a different way and may be an emerging disease in the United States — which means we should keep our eyes open in Canada because of all the trading of cattle and other livestock that goes on.

The bacterium is Bibersteinia trehalosi and is very closely related to M. Hemolytica that is the key bacteria involved in the whole bovine respiratory disease complex. It presents itself as sudden death and in the U.S. has involved Holstein cows primarily and is significant at causing pneumonia and blood infection (septicemia) in sheep. The pneumonia veterinarians see on a post-mortem is really indistinguishable from the M Hemolytica form and it is indistinguishable on routine lab submissions. So unless the lab does special testing it is hard to identify. It may be another emerging component to the whole respiratory disease complex.

U.S. veterinarians noticed this form of pneumonia was different because it was a quick killer of cows and was fairly unresponsive to antibiotics. Part of the reason was its acute nature — the antibiotic simply doesn’t have enough time to work. Also, we generally are not expecting full-grown cows to develop respiratory disease and so it catches us off guard. In some cases, this organism can be quite resistant to many different antibiotics when we culture it.

Even though now there are several good long-lasting macrolide antibiotics for treating groups of high-risk calves, this should not reduce our vigilance in watching for unusual respiratory disease. If the incidence of treatment or death loss is higher than expected or there have been sudden deaths, then have some of the animals autopsied by your veterinarian. Finding the root cause will definitely help them determine better treatment, biosecurity and preventive measures for your farm.

Cow-calf, feeders and feedlot operators have definitely reduced the incidence of pneumonia deaths in Canada over the last decade through a combination of using vaccines with broader coverage, using metaphylactic antibiotics, better treatment antimicrobials, and anti-inflammatory drugs.

Feed conversion is better with less chronics present. So if your response to vaccines seems poor; pulls are too high; or death rates are unacceptable, get the cattle checked and post-mortem any recently dead ones(especially sudden deaths). One of these emerging pathogens (especially B. trehalosi) could be present and you need to do a culture to find out.

Be aware of new advances in the early detection prevention and treatment of respiratory disease. Different vaccination combinations are always presenting themselves and there is always going to be continued research in this area of cattle medicine.

The post Beef 911: Watch for newer respiratory pathogens appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

“We are really slamming into the end of the antibiotic era,” said Dr. Trisha Dowling, a professor of veterinary pharmacology at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine.

“I’ve got 24 different drugs for the treatment of bovine respiratory disease, and it’s still the most economically significant disease problem when it comes to producing a pound of ground beef.

“The wimps, like bovine respiratory disease, they ain’t wimpy no more.”

In a recent study done at Kansas State, researchers found an increase in multi-drug resistance in one of the bacteria — Mannheimia haemolytica — that causes bovine respiratory disease in feedlot cattle.

“Those Mannheimia isolates are showing resistance across the spectrum of antibiotics we use in cattle,” said Dowling, who spoke at the UCVM Beef Cattle Conference in mid-June.

“In 2009, it was only five per cent. In 2011, it was 35 per cent. Now, it’s 70 per cent.”

Her warning was echoed by a senior official with the world’s largest producer of medicine and vaccinations for livestock and pets.

Multi-drug resistance isn’t just a problem with “a few of the big products” that the cattle industry uses, said Dr. Dorothy Erickson, manager of veterinary services at Zoetis.

“Every antibiotic that has ever been developed has eventually had some kind of resistance show up,” said Erickson. “This threatens to take us to a post-antibiotic era where we’re not able to treat common infections any longer. These common infections may become life threatening.

“It is a very real risk.”

Every dose of an antibiotic has a “consequence,” she said.

“The more we use these antibiotics, the more we are selecting to allow those resistant bacteria to survive in our animals and in the environment,” said Erickson. “The more resistance we see coming up in the future, the less effective our products are going to be at treating disease.”

Farmers may soon start to see some of the direct consequences.

“We’ll see increased costs on our operations from increased morbidity, illness, and mortality if our antibiotics aren’t working as well as they used to.”

But because of the linked resistance in different classes of antibiotics, banning the use of antibiotics isn’t going to be effective, said Dowling.

“It’s going to be like closing the barn door after the horse has left. That’s why we have to be so careful with the antibiotic tools that we still have.”

Managing resistance

Up until now, antibiotics have been largely used as a “management tool,” but those days are coming to an end, said Dowling.

“That’s the kind of treatment that puts on the pressure for selecting for antimicrobial resistance,” she said. “We’re only going to be able to use them as an intervention.”

Erickson also said producers need to be more discriminating and use antibiotics “most effectively, where they’re most needed.”

“When we do deem it necessary to use these products, we need to make sure we’re using them correctly,” she said. “Do we have a diagnosis? And are we using the right product? We need to use the most appropriate product to target that specific disease.”

Using the correct dose is important, too.

“Both overdosing and underdosing an antibiotic will contribute to resistance,” said Erickson.

“We also need to be treating that animal for the appropriate amount of time — long enough that we’ve cleared up that infection, but not so long that we’re using those antibiotics unnecessarily.”

And as antimicrobials become less of an option, disease prevention will become even more critical.

“We as an industry need to start looking at alternatives to antibiotics and things that we can do a little bit better,” said Erickson.

Vaccination will be important, but biosecurity is “another huge one — how we manage our operations to avoid bringing disease in, in the first place.”

Stress reduction also plays a role.

“If an animal could do the exact same thing in the exact same spot every day of its life, it would be very happy. Cows enjoy routine,” said Erickson.

“Everything that we can do to keep that animal’s life the same is going to reduce that stress for them. Certain things like cattle handling and our management can help reduce those stresses and help prevent those diseases from getting in, in the first place.”

Ultimately, though, the cattle industry will need to present a “unified front” in order to protect the drugs used to treat common diseases like bovine respiratory disease, said Dowling. Without them, the cattle industry could be facing a crisis.

“In veterinary medicine, the discovery and development of these antibiotics have given us superpowers — but antimicrobial resistance is our kryptonite.”

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