Good evening and welcome to tonight's sponsored webinar currently sponsored by Hoover Farmer. I'm Rich Daley, head of partnerships for the webinar Vet, and delighted to be your chair for this evening. So on to our first speaker for this tonight.

I'm delighted that we are joined by Hawoja Startovich. Hawoya, graduated from the University of Zagreb in 1996, starting his career in dairy industry as manager of raw milk quality, with a majority of it spent in the animal health industry, working for different Croatian and international companies such as Genra, Alltech, MSD. He then specialised in market development, marketing and sales products for ruins.

But yeah, joined Hoover Farmer two years ago, occupying position of global product manager for Ruminant. So, please welcome our first speaker for this evening over to you, Hooia. Thank you very much, Rich, and good evening, everyone.

Hue Pharma is a company with a tradition which dates all the way back to the 1954 when it was established in Peshterra in Bulgaria. Since then, it went through changes and growth and in 2005, the company was privatised and the name of Hoover Pharma was established. Today, Hua Pharma is a global partner in animal health, occupying some of the top spots in the animal health industry.

This, what you can see is in 2017 with recent, mergers, I think that we also entered the top 10 animal health companies in the world. There are more or less 5 pillars that Hoover Pharma stands upon, and basically these can be used as a base for what we are. First of all, it's the quality.

We are in charge of our production. We know exactly what we produce and we do not, depend on the Chinese or any other sources of the active substances. We are very much focused on livestock, which in these days, it's quite a rare thing to do.

We are fully integrated. We control our production, not only in Bulgaria, but also around the world. We are privately owned, which means that the, let's say decisions are going to be made quickly and efficiently, and we are very dynamic and innovation-driven company.

We have more than 3, 3000 people or employees around the world, out of which 2480 are production experts. 570 people are in customer service, finance, sales and marketing, regulatory and quality departments. And this basically tells you that we are quite lean organisation without any insufficient, pyramidal structures.

When I say that we are in charge of our production capacities and our production cycle, that indeed is true, because we are producing all of our APIs which are used for the final products. We produce them from stage one, which is the plate culture or stock frozen, and then basically it goes through the whole production cycle. It goes to the harvesting, the concentrations, the formulation, and at the end of the day, quality control and packaging as well.

We are, as I said, focused on the animal health. In our portfolio, you can find the pharmaceuticals, you can find different types of enzymes, coxidiostats, probiotics, and nutritional products, dietetics, and recently joined hygienic products. Some of the products will be addressed this evening, during this, this, webinar.

But we are not stopping only here. We are also investing in the future. We are also investing in the development.

So recently, what we have done is we have invested more than €150 million to expand our fermentation capacities, which makes us probably one of the largest fermentation companies outside of China and in Europe. We have state of the art R&D laboratories, which are quite important if you are developing new products. Then we have began the construction of our new vaccine plan and hopefully very soon, we will also enter the areas of the biologicals.

We have a company, the warehouses using the latest IT, IT technologies for the logistics support. So all of, of our customers are basically serviced in a very efficient and very fast way. And we are continuously committed.

To product development. So in the near future, you will have more products which are unique in their application or indications out in the market which are going to help the animal health industry to develop further. So with this, thank you very much for the short introduction into Hove Pharma and I'm just, now going to give the floor to our next speaker.

Thank you very much. Fantastic. Thank you very much for that.

Yeah, as we, Frank just shares his presentation, I'll give you a bit of a, bio on our next speaker who is Frank Katzer. Frank is a molecular parasitologist working on protozo, parasites of veterinary and public health importance. He obtained his doctorate, sorry, from the University of York in 1995.

Initially, he worked on tick-borne protozos of parasites of tropical and subtropical importance. In 2007, he joined the Modern Research Institute and focuses on the transmission routes of these parasites, the development of better diagnostic tests and intervention strategies, including vaccines. He's also an editor for two scientific journals, Veterinary Research and Parasites and Vectors.

And look at that, all ready to go. Over to you, Frank. Thank you very much for the introduction.

Yes, I'm based at the Modern Research Institute in Scotland, and we are quite an unusual institute. Some of you may have heard of us, of course, of us before. We look at infectious diseases of livestock and trying to produce intervention strategies, disease control measures, vaccines, diagnostics to help farmers to be more productive.

And we were formed about 100 years ago, actually 99 years ago. Next year it will be 100 and With that, I think I've introduced enough of the institute, and I'm going to actually this topic of the talk today. I'm going to talk about cryptosporidium.

Because a lot of farmers that we work with have been telling us that it's a major problem, and they would like advice and help with this and see what we can come up with. So we provided, or we've done some research and we have provided guidelines and new sheets for them, and I'm going to talk a bit about that today. Initially, a little bit of introduction about the parasite.

It's a single cellular parasite. And there are lots of species. There are currently 40 recognised species, but Most likely they're going to be another 40 species waiting in the wing that just need more characterization before they are recognised species, and there probably are even more.

A lot of these parasites are all specific. And some of them are a little bit more promiscuous, and I'm talking a little bit about the human side before I start talking about the animal side. So on the human sites there are 5 main species Cryptosperidium hominis and Calum are the most important one.

Calm causes about 40 to 45% of clinical cases in humans in the UK and Cho is 45 to 50%, and the rest are made up by the other parasites. But the interesting one is really cryptoridium alum because that can also infect. Castle, and I'm going to come to that after this slide.

I'm sticking a little bit more on the human side, and I just wanted to point out that this parasite is actually of major importance in human health. Cryptosyidosis is the 2nd biggest cause of infant diarrhoea and disease and death in Africa and Asia. And In Scotland, where I'm raised, there are about 400 to 800 cases recorded.

Per year of clinical disease and in England there's 4000 to 7000 cases each year, but these are just the tip of the icebergs because these are clinical cases where people got so ill that they actually went to the doctors to get a diagnosis. And from now onwards, I'm promised I'm going to talk more about the animals side. In cattle, there are 4 main species, and the disease that we see in the calves is, associated with Calum, and we normally see that disease in calves that are less than 6 weeks of age, quite often much younger.

So they probably see the first signs really within the first end of the first week of their life, and then This is usually on bed farms, and you see scour loss of appetite, you see weight loss, they probably suffer abdominal pain. Some of them have mild fever, and in the severe cases, you can actually get this. And I'm going to show you, show you a quick picture, video now.

Oh, sorry. Saying this is what it actually looks like when a calf has a crypto. It's, it's very Watery, it comes out horizontally at times.

It's, yeah, not very pleasant. And you probably also all know, it doesn't smell very nice because it has a very distinct smell. So how important is cryptosporidium, for diarrhoea in calves?

When you look at the VA or VA data from 2012 to 2018, which I pulled, And looked at diagnosis of cryptosporidium in scouring calves, neonatal calves. 48% of the cases were due to cryptos, cryptosporidium. I can't even say that now.

And then otherwise there were also rotavirus, coronavirus, and E. Coli. The problem, of course, is that these sick animals require extra care by the farmer.

And they always pushed for time anyway. And we've also been working with some beef farms in Scotland and Some of them have reported losses, meaning calves dying around up to 10%, and these were in spring calving, at spring carving, where they couldn't turn out calves early because of bad weather. And I'm afraid in Scotland that's a regular occurrence.

Colleagues at the Scottish Agricultural College have worked out what it actually costs in veterinary bills for farmers if they have a diarrhoea outbreak in their calves, and it can cost up to £44 per sick calf during such an outbreak. So very significant for the farmers. This slide really shows you that the cryptosporidium profile is actually quite complicated, that the four different species of crypto, we tend to see at different times at, within the calves.

Within the 1st 4, sorry, 1st 6 weeks of lives, we tend to see, see power of them. And this is usually associated with clinical signs which I've mentioned before. Then when the calves get a little bit older, we also get C bovis, C bovis and Cyani coming in.

But we don't usually see any clinical signs associated with those two parasites. And interestingly, you still get C parm. The calves do not manage to clear the infection completely or they get reinfected.

But they don't build up a sterile immunity. They can always be infected with CA and they can always be shedding Calum. So even at adult stages, you can find, can still find Calum.

But with adult cattle, you also get sander Sona. And in dairy cattle that has been associated with reduced weight gain and reduced milk yields. For the rest of the talk on the on cattle side, I'm really going to concentrate on the calves because that's really where the biggest problem.

I seen the cryptosporidium. And we had a couple of PhD students here who did research. Looking at, sources of infection for the calves.

And they have identified that Potentially, the calves can get it from their mothers. They get it from the environment, sorry. They get it from the environment the calves are reared in.

They can get it from drinking water if Milk is reconstituted or if water is provided later. They can also get it from other animals, that are also on the farm like sheep, deer, and lots of other animals can get infected with crypto, they can be shedding crypto. But the main source for infection for the newborn calves are probably the other calves that they're housed with.

And then there's one final source that we shouldn't forget, and actually that's the farmers or other people coming onto the farm. We can actually easily spread the parasite from one infected animal to uninfected animals. So our work on crypto really started about 8 or 7 or 8 years ago.

When, Actually 10 years ago. I'm looking at the wrong date here. When there was a group of farmers that reported that they lost quite a lot of calves.

And that those were beef calves. To, due to crypto. We then set up a project where we went and did interviews, we took samples and got more information from those farms and The interesting bit was that one farmer reported that 30% of his calves were lost due to diarrhoea.

They didn't have all diagnosis of crypto, but crypto was there. And other farms, they had losses due to enterritis for up to 10.5%.

So very significant losses for the beef industry. And this was seen at spring carving time. And yeah, it's indoor we get cars where they couldn't turn them out in time.

So one of the PhD students we had here looked at the effect on growth of cryptosporidium infection because other than the initial losses due to the disease, think, does it have any long-term effect? And Hannah picked a farm where, the year before, about 15 to 30% of calves were lost. She went in on 2 daily or every 2 days, scored calves that were born on that calves for until they were about 16 days old because we had got data that by that stage they back to recovery.

And a And she also tested all calves for crypto, of course, but also for other pathogens that can cause diarrhoea, and the farm was BVD accredited since 2009. So she split her calves based on clinical symptoms into three groups. Animals that had severe cryptos, some that had mild crypto, and some that showed no signs of infection.

And then she monitored weight gain for those calves for 6 months. And What she found was that the severely affected calves, Group A here were on average 34 kg lighter than the calves that had no clinical cryptosporidium. This difference was highly significant.

And in financial terms it's also a big loss for the farmer because those 34 kg equivalent equate to about 128 pounds, so a real significant loss for the farmer or the farmer has to keep the calves longer for them to gain the extra weight. And again, that's costs associated with this and so I probably should say that was at 6 months of age. So why is cryptosporidium such a big problem on farms?

And the first answer to that is that the osis, the infective stages of the parasite, are resistant to commonly used disinfectants. Most of those disinfectants don't really kill them very effectively. Lots of the parasites can survive.

So, there's to some extent resistant to heat and also to cold. So some of the parasites will survive even up to 60 degrees or down to -20. And in cool, moist environments like we have in Scotland.

The parasite stays alive for quite a long time, so in water we can keep the parasite alive in the fridge for about a year. So Quite a big problem. On the farm because we don't really have extreme temperatures there.

Usually it's moist, so the parasite stays alive. The other big problem is that the infective dose for infecting an animal or a human is actually quite low. 10 tenosis can cause disease.

And infected animals can shed billions of viruses. So therefore, once you have the infection going in your calf population, it can build up very quickly and spread rapidly around your calves. The other thing is also infective dose is important because the higher the infectious dose, usually the more severe the disease symptoms are.

So how does it actually work that the parasite can multiply within an infected animal to that extent? And What happens is that When a newis is ingested in a by a calf, then in the guts. The content of the osis, is shed, which are for sporozoids.

These infect the lumen of the guts and produce new ocysts, some of which will open up again, release poresys, and cause reinfection, but others are shed in the faeces. The interesting thing about this parasite is that once the uses are shared in the faeces, they're instantly infectious. So, the next calf coming along, having contact with the infected faeces can instantly become infected.

So what are actually the treatment options or the options for managing? The disease. I'm, I'm afraid there is currently no vaccine available.

And we have now 2 drugs since last year. Before that, we just had Haliure, but then last year Power for crypto was launched. So both of those have an effect against crypto.

They both have to be used for 7 consecutive days in neonatal calves. Haliure reduces shedding but doesn't cure the animals. Haliure is also toxic even in relatively low doses, so you can't give it to scouring calves.

But you also have to get your dose right so that if you, if you give double the dose, for example, you will actually cause scour in those calves even if they don't have crypto. Powerful crypto. Is an antimicrobial.

We're going to hear more about that later. But one thing that is really important, it needs to be used responsible to make sure that we don't, con contribute to the spread of antimicrobial resistance. So how do we know that we have cryptosperium on the farm?

It's usually like shown in the video earlier, is when you see calves having profuse, profuse watery diarrhoea. And if those calves are less than 3 weeks of age, then it's quite a good indication that you probably have, crypto on the farm. But you really need a diagnostic test to confirm that it's crypto and not one of the other pathogens, and that can be done by testing the faeces or if they are dead calves, they can be examined at postmortem.

So how do we reach the diagnosis usually by, knowing the farm history. Quite often the problem farms tend to have crypto almost on a yearly basis. We can detect the infectious stages of the parasite, the ureocyst and the faeces using microscopy, but there are also dipstick tests available now where you can just, work out instantly whether it's actually crypto, E.

Coli, or one of the other, of one of the viruses that's causing diarrhoea. For research purposes, there is PCR and then in the extreme cases, we have the pathology that can actually show the parasite in the gut. So how can we manage crypto on the farm other than this treatment?

And actually good biosecurity and hygiene standards are important, so. If you manage to reduce the environmental contamination, you manage to reduce the spread of the disease and you reduce the disease symptoms. So therefore, steam cleaning pens is very important because the heat of the steam will actually kill some russ and the water will wash the remaining ress away.

So it's a much more efficient way of cleaning out, although the operator should wear a masks so that they are not exposed to aerosols containing parasites. The calf area should be cleaned frequently. To reduce the build up of ISIS.

If you have group pens, add straw regularly to keep a a barrier between the older faeces and actually the animals. And then generally on management purpose, management terms for the farm. Manage your slurry well, ferment it well, composted before you put it on to pasture, because the heat from The composting will actually kill the power site.

The other bit that is very important is, lustrum management. So there's 3 cues of lustrum, quickness, quality, quantity are all important. Because calves can only absorb the antibodies and cytokines in of the colostrum within the first few hours of birth.

So therefore, get it in quickly. Good quality is important, so good antibody tiers, . Is important quantity also because This is passive immunity, so the more they can absorb, the better because, they can't make any more till their own immune system kicks in later on.

The other important bit is keeping animals in within the same age groups so that the older calves don't infect the younger ones. If you have calves that are sick, quarantine them. And you have to remember that even so they stop scouring, they probably can still sit relatively high number of parasites for about a week after they stop having diarrhoea.

And then the other thing that's very important for the farmer is that the feed and treat the animals after they look after the healthy ones, because otherwise, if you go to the sick animals first, You're then more likely to spread the parasites to the healthy calves, and you don't want that. When you look at the literature for disinfectants, so when I said steam cleaning, very important, but then also you, it's important to use disinfectants. When we, when I looked through, well, I mean my PhD student looked through available web pages and and information, there were those four products that claimed to have activity against cryptosporidium.

The interesting bit is on the left-hand side is that quite a lot of these have much higher working concentration than farmers would normally use. And then on the right-hand side, the other important thing is That the contact time is much longer. It's not an instance for most of these apart from hydrogen peroxide that works instantly, but it doesn't work for very long.

And when Hannah looked at the efficiency of these different, disinfectants. And so to explain this graph and say, this is what the level of vibe on the left-hand side is the level of viability of untreated erosis. When these were treated with the different disinfectants, you drew lose viability.

So hydrogen peroxide here. Was the most effective one, but Kenna Cox and Neopredisan. And telex were also very effective.

Also, Sideex, and then FA 30, which is a commonly used farm disinfectant, wasn't that effective. It's just kill ross, but not that effectively, and these were all tested at the higher working concentrations than the farmers normally use anyway. So, Really, the take home message is that hydrogen peroxide works best.

Or hydrogen peroxide-based disinfectants works best, but there is a problem with that the hydrogen peroxide is quite nasty to work with. Although the benefit is it breaks down into water, so you don't have any nasty residues afterwards. But then Neopretisan and Kocco are also quite effective and offer good working solutions for the farmers.

Hannah also shown that the disinfectants were all less effective if they were in. Mixed or if the uses were mixed in with faeces or straw because the biological material. Effect, dilutes the effect of the disinfectants.

The other important thing is if you make up your disinfectants to a working concentration, That's a The product will deteriorate quite quickly over time and it should be used freshly. So the other important things when you have scour on the farm is to remember it's not just cryptosporidium. You could have E.

Cola, salmonella, rotavirus, coronavirus, or Ameria. Therefore, you do need a diagnosis. But it's also important to know that If you have mixed infections with different pathogens, then the effect can be far worse.

So the general recommendation would be that if you have a crypto problem, also try to deal with the others like using rotave Corona vaccine, because that will help to control rotavirus, coronavirus, and E. Coli. The other option is for slightly older calves.

It's also feeding. Adult cattle decox because that will have an effect on a area that's present. But the really important thing is accurate diagnosis, so you know what you're dealing with.

And I'm talking to the converters here because you're all vets here. So, Get your diagnosis and you can get a basic test which comes back if you can't do it with a dipstick or in-house, if you send it away, that comes back in 3 days. If you do a full larger stream, I'm afraid it does take up to 7 days.

So with that, I actually finished and the work and guidance that I've been talking about actually involved quite a large number of people here at Morden and at other collaborating. Places and funding from quite a few people, or institutions were involved. And with that, I am finished and I'm heading back to the team.

Thank you very much for that, Frank. As we said at the beginning, if you do have any questions, please do pop them in the Q&A box. I can see a couple of the questions have already come in, but, please do, if anything has popped up there, you'd like to ask Frank.

Frank will be staying with us, so they'll be available for you to ask at the end. So, without further ado, I'm handing over back over to Hewer. Thank you very much.

I'm going to start my, presentation on part of 4 with, with the point that Frank has made a couple of times during his presentation, and that is the accurate diagnosis. If you know exactly what you are dealing with, that's almost halfway through to the solution. Now, in order to, to make the decision-making process easier and shorter, we have Being able to supply the market with the diagnostic tools.

And Frank has mentioned already that there are tools which can be used on farms quick and easy and give you an overview of what we are dealing with. We have the kits which are called Huechek kits. There are 3 types of them.

There is the Hovechek 4, the HCEk 5, and the Huezek crypto. The difference between HHX 4 and 5 is the two strains of E. Coli, and I will tell you why E.

Coli is also important when it comes to the question of, of parafo. Well, when it comes to the use, the practical use of the test, it's quite easy. You have to follow certain steps, which is to take the sample either directly from the animal or from the faeces, which is found there.

Then you have to dilute it, depending on the, on the, consistency of the faeces. Then you have to expose the dipsticks to the diluted faeces. And basically, within 10 minutes, You will have the results.

And with these results, you can then follow up and you can more or less decide what is going to be your treatment protocol. Now, the power for crypto is a product which is specific in so many different ways. So let me briefly go through what Paraor really is.

First of all, It's a paramycin-based product. It is the product that has been developed as an oral solution. It is a very well-known extended spectrum aminoglycozide, so it means that it is an antimicrobial.

Active substance. Being an, being an antimicrobial active substance means that this product is going to be effective against the pathogens which are more or less bacteria but also the protozoa. And this makes this product quite unique.

It is also very safe to use. The bioavailability of parafour or the paramamycin is very low. It's only 2%, which means that the parafour, when applied, is going to be present where it's needed, when it's needed, and that the quantity which, which needs to fight the pathogens.

We are the ones who are producing. The active substance. We have done this for over 60 years and we know exactly what is in the product, 365 days per year.

This makes part of our very consistent in quality and efficacy. And with all this said, we can, with a very large dose of confidence say that the part of our crypto is the golden standard in treatment of calf diarrhoea. Now, I've mentioned briefly that the active substance is the paramycin sulphate, which is indeed an extended spectrum aminoglycozide working effectively against gram-posit and gram-negatives, including E.

Coli, and also it has the anti-protozoal spectrum on the cryptosporidium. So with that said, It makes clear that when you apply the parafour, you will not only fight cryptosporidosis, but you will also find infections with the E. Coli.

So, more or less, the two very important pathogens in calf diarrhoea. Now, it's also a concentration-dependent antibiotic, which makes it very convenient to use. You can use it one time per day, and concentration is well above the MIC's 90 for the, for the, pathogens, not for the crypto because that's, that's a protozoan.

But basically, it gives you, very well. Dispersed range of activity. Now you know that in aminoglycocytes, you have 3 types of them.

You have the narrow ones, the broad ones, and the extended ones where the paramamycin is. Now, just to summon up these qualities of the product is that it reaches the high gut concentrations and this is where the pathogen is. And then it's very specific because it's effective against the E.

Coli and the cryptosporidium. There is hardly any absorption. So as you have heard from the Frank's presentation, when you use halocu, halocu is quite toxic.

The safety margin with Parafour is, is incredible. So basically, it's a very safe product to use and you don't have to worry about overdose. And the, for me, the, the biggest, upside of this product is that it goes out of the organism almost in an unchanged form.

So it's an unchanged molecule, meaning that it goes inside, does the job, and exits the organism as it should be. Now, there is a lot of, there's a lot of discussions about really how does it work on cryptosporidium. There is a, there is a publication which was looking into the mechanism of action.

And just to summarise what was written in that is that basically, the remnant host cell membranes and the parasittopherous vacuoli, which are overlying the parasite, are the major routes of entry of these drugs to the parasite, meaning that when the parasite enters the cell, it sort of pushes the cytoplasm away. And then communicates with the, with the lumen through these micro porous channels where the product also gets into the parasite and this is why parafour is so effective against the cryptosporidium. The product is intended for use in calves, but also in other species, so small ruminants like the sheep and also the goat kids, and we have registered it for all the species.

The dose, of course, is 150 milligrammes of paramycin sulphate per kilogramme of body weight for seven consecutive days. That's about 2.5 mL of product per 10 kilogrammes of body weight for seven consecutive days for, for calves, and 0.25 millilitres of product for 1 kilogramme of body weight for 7 consecutive days for sheep or for lambs and for the boat kids.

Withdrawal times for the, for the calves is 62 days and for the small ruminants, 24. It comes in different pack sizes of 125 mL, 250, and 501 litre. So basically, you can use it in different species and different size of the farms.

Mind you, not all part, pack sizes may be marketed. So please contact our representatives, for more information on, on that. We have also devised a number of dosing devices which allow you to apply the product in a proper way.

According to the SPC, part for crypton needs to be given directly into the mouth of the animal as a drench. So for that reason, we have two types of drenches, which is the 12.5 for the, for the calves, and 0.2 to 2 mL if necessary for the small ruminants and also for piglets because the power 4 is, registered for piglets as well, not the power for crypto.

And then we have also the 25 mL dosing devices, which also can be used, with, with certain types of products. With this, I, I'm finishing this short overview of the, of the power for. If you have any questions, I would be more than glad to answer them in the question and answer session, or if you need any clarifications, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Thank you very much. So, on to our third and final speaker of this webinar. I'm delighted to welcome Sarah Gibbs.

Sarah graduated from the Royal Veterinary College in 2015 and works as a clinical vet at LLM Farm Vets. Having started her career completing a dairy internship at LLM, she continues to do predominantly dairy work. She has a special interest in heifer rearing, providing calf consultancy visits, and running discussion groups.

And I'm pleased to say she's all set up and ready to go. Over to you, Sarah. Thank you.

Good evening and thank you for inviting me to be involved in this webinar tonight. I'm gonna be giving a short presentation looking at the practical control of cryptospiliosis and just discussing our experience using powerful crypto in the management of this disease. The practise I work at is based in Shropshire, and this area surrounding counties have a high density of dairy farms.

So the majority of young stock work I do tends to be with dairy calves. Crypto is a very common problem on these farms. So we tend to see it very regularly, and just to demonstrate this, I've put up some results from the Welsh Young Sto Project, which was a survey done, between 2015 and 2016 on Welsh dairy farms.

And you can see from these results, the headline results there that 25% of cars are treated for scour, which is, I think very high. And actually 18% of farms were currently using prophylactic cryptospiliosis treatment. They also took scour samples as part of this study, and found that 76% of the scar samples tested were positive for crypto.

So as you can see, we haven't got this disease under control, and there's definitely room for improvement. So why is it such a problem in the UK, and elsewhere, and why, why are our calves so at risk? So as you'll know, for the vets working in the UK, the dairy rearing, calf systems vary massively.

So where I work, there's a lot of the hutches, and these might be single pair or small group housing. And these work fairly well in terms of disinfectant, disinfecting them, especially if they're on concrete bases with the drainage. But we do have older systems, which may be more difficult in terms of access for cleaning them out.

They use different materials, which may be difficult to disinfect, particularly, if calves are housed on, not on concrete and are on, hardcore or soil, that can be extremely difficult to get rid of the sis burden. And then finally, we do have some block carving herds and these tend to house their calves in groups. And this system works well in the fact that the housing is generally had time to rest, so there should be a loan.

Cars in these housing systems. However, towards the end of the calving season, you can start to see a buildup of disease, and that's when you'll see cars starting to scour. So in terms of dairy calves, I've just put down, like a summary slide here of why I think we see so much crypto.

And one of the things is that in the UK, all year round calving is very common. So 80% of dairy herds are all year end calving, and this means there's limited time to rest the pens, and calves are born in poorer weather conditions. At the moment, we're definitely seeing more disease in the wetter, colder months, than we see in the summer.

We also have older housing systems and a lot of cars aren't housed on concrete, which in terms of disinfection make it extremely difficult. And then finally, a lot of farms don't operate what I call true snatch calving, so cars will stay with the dam for possibly 2 hours, 3 hours, anything up to 24 hours, 48 hours. And during that time when they're in the calving yard, I think they get exposed to crypto, despite how clean your actual calf housing may be, they may have already picked up the disease before they've been moved to it.

So how would I approach a outbreak of scour? So this has been brought up. I think it's really important that we make a diagnosis, so the different causes of scour will have different treatments and also different control strategies.

So in the young calves, we use a lot. Of these scour kits, as, was described, it's very quick, it's practical. We'll actually give them to farmers to have on farm and train them to use them, but that when they have an outbreak, or have a case of scour, the first few cases, they can get a result very quickly and know what to do.

Once we've got a diagnosis, and if it's crypto, you can obviously treat the individual, but the main thing is the population medicine. So we want to be looking at the management and identifying risk factors which are putting those cards in extra challenge. So in terms of disease, we're always weighing up that balance between challenge versus immunity, and coming to scour, in particular, particularly scour in very young calves, it can really be simplified into hygiene versus flushing.

Unfortunately, we don't have a vaccine at the moment, . But that would be good if someone could start working on it. So I don't have, I'm not going to cover claustrum, you know, this is a short presentation, but I'm just going to touch on hygiene.

I think it's really important not to forget the carving yard, so be asking your farmers how clean is the carving yard, how frequently is it cleaned out, and how long are the cars with the dam. If you know the carving yard isn't maybe, maintained as bizarrely as possible. It might be that you just say the cars need to come out of there as soon as possible to limit the time they're in that contaminated environment.

So the next thing is looking at the calf housing. So I think it's really important that newborn calves enter clean housing. And this can become a challenge, when you're housing, calves together.

So, for instance, if you've got a group of 5 calves and the oldest calf is 7 days old before the last calf enters that group, that pen can be fairly contaminated but at day one for that last calf that enters that group. But for newborns, I tend to say I don't want more than 2 or 3 days age difference between a group of calves, ideally. I'd also be checking is feeding equipment cleaned regularly?

Is there any opportunity for spread between groups? This might actually be, through people who are managing the cars, so on their clothing or on their boots. And is there any opportunity for the pens to be rested?

It's been touched upon in terms of disinfections, disinfectants, so it's really important to check what disinfectant they're using and check that it is active against crypto. Also checking how long they're applying it for and what the concentration is they're using it at to check that it's appropriate. So I've just put up some quite nice examples that I've seen on farm, of good hygiene, and things may be the be all and end all in crypto control, but they are nice examples of, the sort of standards we should be looking for.

I've put the wheelbarrow in there. It's often something that's forgotten. You can look at the calving yard and look at the calf housing, and forget the way the calf gets between those two environments.

And sometimes that can be the dirtiest thing, on farm. So I'm now just gonna touch upon Powerful crypto and how we've been using this product in control strategies, . Paraphol crypto has been licenced in the UK since the start of the year, and as we've heard, the active ingredient is paramycin.

It's indicated for the reduction in the occurrence of diarrhoea due to diagnosed cryptos and parm. And ideally it should be given to, calves before the onset of clinical signs, but upon a diagnosis of crypto in the faeces. Practically that's quite difficult to do.

So I'll just go through how we're using the products. As we've heard, paramycin is not very well absorbed from the gut. And this is one of the reasons, we choose to use the product, because of that safety margin, and because we've had some experiences with toxicity before using halauginone.

The product comes in the bottle showing in the top right with a smaller bottle show in the top right of the screen, with a dosing, gun on top, and that's set up for a 50 kg calf, so it gives out 12.5 mL in each trench. Before this was licenced, we had been using the Parafour powder, and we're using that to treat bacterial scours, so E.

Coli scours. However, we did have knowledge that paramycin was used in human medicine, for the treatment of cryptospiliosis, and I think there'd been some data, published at World Buiatrics, discussing the benefits of paramycin in cars with crypto. So what we were seeing on farm was, although we were combating the E.

Coli, we were also seeing benefits in terms of the crypto control. But when this product came available with the licence crypto, we were really pleased to have it there as another option in the control of this disease. So when do we use powerful crypto?

Obviously, in the face of an outbreak, so this could be a small outbreak within a a group, a small group of carbs, maybe a bigger outbreak, . On in farms with chronic crypto challenge. So we will actually use it in the treatment of clinical cases of scour.

If you have a farm that you know crypto is a problem on, this would be our first line treatment. So, but what we'd say to a farmer is to treat the calf at the very onset of clinical signs, and then treat any cars in direct contact with that calf. So it might be the 2 or 3 pen mates with it.

In more severe outbreaks, we may extend that metaphylactic treatment. So by this, I mean, if you've got a high, morbidity, so you've got a lot of calves scarring, or you've actually lost some calves. And in this situation, it can be quite stressful, and it just, it can help you get on top of that outbreak by treating, all the calves whilst you can.

Look at those management practises and get the environmental pressure down, and hopefully then wean them off the treatment. Right, so how are we using it? As I said, it's an oral treatment and it's, we, I mean, it's licenced to feed directly into the mouth, but some farmers, if they're feeding calves in a single pen, they will put it into the milk.

And calves are treated for 7 days. For the treatment of scours, we would give this at the onset of scours, so as early as possible, and any carbs in direct contact. It goes alongside all your standard treatment protocols for calf scours, so your oral fluid therapy is really important still.

We'll still recommend giving anti-inflammatories and we'll always offer milk, and give them access, free access to water as well. In terms of using it as an extended metaphylaxis as part of a control strategy. In this situation, you will be treating calves before the onset of clinical signs, so it's really important to have a discussion with your farmers about when they are seeing disease, because you want your treatment to cover the highest risk period.

So for instance, if a farm sees calves scouring from 7 days of age, generally, you might say to start treatment timing at about day 5 or 6 before you start seeing those clinical signs. If the farm generally has scour later, say at 2 weeks of age, we push that back then to say at day 12 or day 13 to start that treatment. Obviously, this is always in conjunction with looking at those management practises and changes and making changes to reduce the challenge.

So what experience have we had? We've been really pleased with the product. It's, you can be quite confident that if you've had an outbreak, having an outbreak, that if you go in and you treat a group of cars with this, you will get on top of it whilst they're on treatment, and it just gives you that bit of time to get the infection pressure down.

I did call up some farmers before this, this meeting and ask them some feedback, and these were some of the things they came back to me with. So they were happy with how they gave the product. They said it's very easy to administer and what they liked was even if you had a sick calf, so it was unwilling to suckle, it was easy to still dose the calf.

They said the cars respond very quickly, and again they've got confidence in it if they had an outbreak situation that it would get on top of that outbreak. We had some farmers that had used Hafeinone before, for cryptocontrol, and these farmers that have now gone on to powerful crypto actually said that they thought they saw a better response. And as well as before, they'd had some calf scarring on treatment.

They hadn't noticed that as much with the, powerful crypto. And then finally, the last comment relates to farmers that are using the parafour powder before and they much prefer the liquid because when you're not using the powder, regularly, they said there was some waste with it getting damp. So this was just some practical things to consider when you're using the product.

So although it's not well absorbed from the gut, obviously a newborn calves gut is, more permeable. So it's important that you don't treat calves less than a day of age because it will cross that gut barrier. You generally wouldn't need it that young, I suppose the youngest will start treating calves generally from day 3 or 4, and that's in farms which have very early crypto.

I've also put down here that the treatment timing is really important, so it needs to match that match that highest risk period on each farm, and that will vary. So having that conversation about when disease is usually seen is important and also monitoring the response to treatment. Checking whether they're seeing scours after the treatment is finished, checking if they're seeing any before the treatment starts, because it might be that you just need to tweak that protocol and adjust the timing just to make sure you cover that risk area.

And finally, obviously prevention is better than cure, so this is, whilst you're treating cars, you're always looking to address the management factors and minimise the risk. Right, thank you for listening. I think we'll be hosting questions.

Yes, thank you very much, Sarah. And thank you to all of our speakers, tonight. As Sarah said, we've got a little bit of time for some questions.

I know some have come in already, but please do feel free to pop them in the Q&A box, and I'll try and get through as many as possible. Also, just as a little reminder while you're thinking of questions at the end of this webinar, a short survey will pop up in your browser. I really appreciate it.

If you could, take time to complete that'll take a couple of minutes just to provide feedback, and also, obviously it was kindly, this webinar is kindly sponsored by Hoover Farmer, and so, they would really appreciate, you completing the questionnaire as well. So we've got some good questions just check everyone is back with us, if I just mute. Frank Yeah, I'm here on mute, .

You as well, and yep, and we'll leave Dawn muted because she's native pot. So first question is, to yourself, Frank, OK, and it's asking, what about small ruminants? Obviously we focus very much on, calves today, but do, small ruminants also suffer from, cryptosporidius as well.

Yes, they do. And, and if you're talking about lambs and goat kids, they actually suffer from the same species of crypto cryptosporidium parum that's causing the disease there. Again, sheep and goats have other cryptosporidium species that come in later, just like with the calves, and they normally don't cause disease.

So they can confuse diagnosis a bit. But generally, in the very young animals, it's always the problem that we see and yeah, up until recently, there was no licence stock for the treatment of, sheep and goats, but that has changed now. So I'm sure the farmers are very happy about that.

Fantastic. Thank you. I think this one's probably still be for yourself, Frank, but obviously, feel free to step in if you've got any sort of, anecdotal evidence on this one, Sarah, is, do some breeds exhibit more resilience to crypto, infection disease and others.

Is there anything through studies you found there? You would think that, normally it's beef cattle seem to be more resistant. We see less disease in beef cattle, but I think it's the management that's different and that's causing, well, that's why we don't see so much disease.

Personal experience is with infections, you can see disease in any breeds. I, To me, the, the biggest difference is actually the management practise, because if you can manage to calve outdoors, they don't, the calves don't have the exposure. They might get some crypto, but they don't get the huge infective doses like, Sarah was saying that at the end of, the last calf you put into a carving pin is, is actually the one that gets the highest dose.

It's usually also the one that gets sickest. So with the Indo or we had cattle, we, we do see. The problem is at the end of the calving period, the calves pawn later have the biggest problem.

So I would say there is actually no breed difference. It's just management. No problem.

And have you got anything to add to that, sir, would you concur with what Frank was saying there? Yeah, I'd agree. I don't know of any breed, variation in terms of resistance.

Yeah, it just comes down to management. Fantastic. Thank you very much.

Next question that's coming. Should affected farm perform sample testing of manure, or slurry before spreading in the pasture, and is this feasible? I guess that's for me again, I suppose you just monopolise this it's fine.

I think that's the only questions that came in that that's fine. With slurry testing. If you actually manage, you, actually, sorry, the liquid itself is probably the safest bit on the farm because there's lots of ammonia in there, and ammonia is very effective at killing cryptosporidium.

So the liquid waste is fine. Anything that's more solid waste that was composted, it's, if the composting is done appropriately and it's turned. Then it's safe because the heat will kill the parasite.

However, There is actually no good test that you can apply. You can, because every test that we have at the moment, we'll just test for presence or absence of the parasite, but it doesn't tell you viability. So even if you have parasite there, it went into the, The manure and got heated up, got killed.

The tests will show that the parasite is there, but it's dead. So, I think good management practise is the best thing we can, advise on. Turn your, manure.

Fantastic. Thank you very much. I think this is another one for you, Frank, to be fair, most of the questions came in during your part of the presentation.

. What's the minimum amount of colostrum each calf should receive? Actually, can I put that on to Sarah? Yeah, I can do this one.

We tend to recommend a 10% of body weight, which for, dairy calf, so a 40 kg dairy calf, we'd say 4 litres. And as soon as possible after birth, but at least within the 1st 4 hours of life. And secondary feeds are a bonus, but that first one is the main most important one.

I'd like calves to get another 2 litres within the next 12 hours, but that first feed is really the key crucial one. And that's 10% of the body weight you're saying, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that would fit with the data I have to.

Brilliant, thank you. questions coming in about the, cleaning. I've got a couple of questions are coming about it in terms of what is the best way to clean car feeding equipment and, you know, sort of linking on to that.

Is washing with a, you know, a pressure washer beneficial or can it potentially, you know, if not done effectively spread the parasite to other parts of the premises? Sarah, Frank, I suppose, if you want to come in on that. From a, a a water pressure thing, I tend to recommend it because it is effective at getting rid of the solid faeces that are there.

In terms of spreading it, I suppose. That would become difficult if you were trying to clean out a pen where you've got calves in next door at the time, but generally farmers will clear a line of pens, in which case you can just make sure you start at one end and wash any of the faeces that gets sprayed down to the other end, . And then in terms of feeding equipment, people use different things.

Some people have used, the disinfectants, which are active against crypto, but I always just like to make sure that it's washed off thoroughly before you feed the calves because you don't want it to, even just flavour the milk differently or put the carbs off or have any irritant effect to them. So I usually recommend use, use a disinfectant, but make sure you clean it off afterwards. Fantastic.

Thank you very much. And I think Sarah has covered that well. I don't really have anything else to add because yeah, pressure washer is recommended, but it can spread.

So ideally, you don't have other calves directly standing next to it, but Yeah. Thank you very much. This webinar is recorded and will be available, to watch again within the next 24 to 48 hours.

So if you did miss any of the elements or didn't have quite a chance to note down a few of the points on any of the slides, then obviously, you can refer back to it. We will be emailing out to you all to let you know it is available to watch the recording. So, if you did miss anything, then please do refer back to that.

We've had a comment to say thank you. Those are 3 complimentary presentations, very useful instructive. So thank you very much for that.

And really, I think that is the majority of the questions we've covered off there. So, thank you for doing that. All it leads me to do is obviously say thank you once again to Hoover Farmer for sponsoring tonight's webinar.

Without companies like Hoover Farmer, it, you know, it's not possible to bring you all these fantastic webinars with these great speakers. So hopefully, you've, really enjoyed it and taken a lot from it. Thank you to Dawn, who's been working around in the background, supporting, helping people if they required it.

So thank you very much to Dawn. Thank you, of course, to yourselves for joining tonight's webinar. Once again, I say I hope that you found it, useful.

We will be in touch with you for future webinars, but also to let you know when this is, now available on the website. And of course, thank you to our three fantastic speakers, all given a very different angle, but hopefully, we've given you very much food for thought and ideas to take back into your daily practise. So I hope you've, enjoyed that.

So thank you very much from me. I'm gonna wish you a very pleasant Christmas and New Year, because, this is probably one of our last, webinars, on farm for this year. But we do look forward to working on future webinars in 2020.

So, thank you and good night. Thank you. Thank you.

Good night.