Good evening everyone, and thanks for joining us for tonight's BCVA Student Clinical Club. My name is Sarah Peterson from the BCVA board, and I'll be chairing the session tonight. So the format tonight is that our speaker, Sarah Hampson will talk you through CAF scour investigation, and then we will have about half an hour, 45 minutes, Q&A session at the end for you all to ask your questions.
There are polls throughout the session tonight, so I just want to reiterate, like the previous sessions that we've done, that these are all just for fun. We don't know who's answered what, they're completely anonymous. So even if you're not sure, just have a stab at it, and join in.
If you've got any questions for Sarah as we go through, then please type them in the Q&A box, and I'll save them until the end for our discussion. You can also use the Q&A, or chat to let us know if you're having any technical difficulties, and we'll do our best to help you out as well. If you're having trouble seeing the chat or the Q&A box, then just wiggle your mouse, and, the taskbar should become visible at the bottom of your screen.
So, it's my pleasure to unite to introduce fellow BCBA board member, Sarah, as our speaker. Sarah's a practising clinical vet working at LLM Farm Vets in Shropshire, and that's where she started her career as an LLM dairy intern. She's remained there ever since and predominantly undertakes dairy work now, but has a special interest in young stock management and heifer rearing.
She's part of the leadership group at LLM where she's recently been appointed chair of the board, and she also joined us recently on BCBA board and is a member of our education working group. So tonight, Sarah's going to take us through CISA, CAF scour investigation. Over to you, Sarah.
Thanks, Sara, and good evening and thank you for joining the webinar tonight. So Sara said the topic for discussion this evening is CSI calf, so calf scar investigation. So I'll be just going through some practical advice on dealing with calf health problems in practise.
As Sara's mentioned in the intro, I'm a clinical vet, so I've been working at LLM for about 6 to 7 years. I do do predominantly dairy practise, so this will come from a dairy perspective, but there's no reason why you can't apply some of the principles to beef, vetting as well. So I'm doing this presentation on behalf of the BCVA, so I just wanted to start by just going through what the BCVA is about, what we get up to and how you can get involved.
So who are the BCVA? So BCVA specialist cattle division of the BVA, so similar to the BSAVA, for small animals, and beaver for equine. So as well as promoting, we're a member organisation, so as well as promoting, cattle health and welfare, one of our primary objectives is representing the views of our members, in the wider, agricultural community.
It's run by a board of directors who are volunteers who are elected into those positions, and that board is, people in academia and in history, so this is the current board. So at the moment, our president is Nicky Hopkins. Now she's a practising vet who's working in North Wales, and I'm sure you'll recognise potentially some of the other faces on the board.
I only joined the board last year, so I'm fairly new to it. From a completely selfish perspective, I've really enjoyed it. It's taught me a lot and exposed me to a lot of different areas in the industry I work in.
It's been a bit of a funny year, obviously, with coronavirus, so things like CPD and the, congress have unfortunately been cancelled, but hopefully we'll get back to those shortly. So what does the board do? So as I said, we want to be the voice of the cattle vet and promote and drive tomorrow's practise.
So the sort of things we're involved in our health and welfare initiatives, so things like checks accreditation, we have representatives on a mastitis steering group, the mobility steering group, and a BVD group. We're government liaison, so we'll deal with government initiatives. One of the big things we're helping out with at the moment is the annual health pathway.
We've also liaised with the BVA quite closely. We have a TB working group and a medicines group. So there's a lot of different areas that we'll be having input into on behalf of our members.
And how can you get involved? So as students, there are options for membership, and generally this would have been 5 pounds. Well, you can still join as an EM member as 5 pounds, or you can become a full member for 25 pounds.
And the member benefits are quite large, so you get a bi-monthly newsletter, you get the Access to Cattle practise, which is a cattle journal. You get hard copies of cattle practise as well, if you don't want them just via email. You get free access to BCVA webinars and reduced rates for the Congress, and you get member representation on a national level.
At the moment, we are offering these things, for free, so you've got a lot of access to, online resources and to cattle practise. So it's a really great opportunity at the moment to get involved and, pick up some, 3 pieces of information. So we do have some student reps at each university.
So there's some pictures of these guys here. So if you've got any questions about BCVA I'd be pointing them in their direction first and foremost. So just to start off with, we'd like to do a poll of which university you guys are from, just to give us a bit of an idea who's in the group at the moment.
OK, so not a trick question, just to let, just to make sure everybody's polling is working OK. So we've nearly got all of you voted, so we'll just give you a couple more seconds and then we'll wrap it up there. OK, so tonight, Liverpool is in the lead.
We've got 38% of our audience is from Liverpool, followed by, joint second we've got Bristol and Edinburgh with 19%, and we've got some Glasgow, Cambridge, and Dublin as well. So Liverpool. Comes out as best.
Thanks, it's good to know there's people from all over the shop. Right, so I'm gonna carry on. So, as I said, the topic for tonight is CSI calf.
Now, I called this presentation this, not just as a gimmick to draw you into another calf diarrhoea presentation, but I just wanted to get you thinking about calf health investigations as a sort of crime investigation, and you guys are the detectives, and you want to find out who the villains are and how they have the opportunity. So for that you need to know how to, where to look for one, and also what questions to ask. Like a game of who'd done it, it might not be Colonel Mustard in the billiards room with a sneaker quick que.
But it could be E. Coli in the calving yard with secretory diarrhoea, or it could be mycoplasma in the waste milk. So it's like a really geeky game of Clud.
So, I'm just gonna give you a quick overview of what we'll cover. So to start off with, I just wanna make sure we're putting what we're doing as dairy vets, into perspective. So when we're thinking about calf health, we want to think about the bigger picture and what are our targets for heifer rearing, so what are we trying to achieve.
We're going to look at calf disease and why it's important, why it matters, the impacts it has. Then we're going to look at the factors influencing calf health. We'll be looking at the approach to calf health visit, and, and what I'd like to give you is a really, simple way of going into these calf health visits when you first come out of university, so you've got a really structured approach to it.
And then finally we'll be looking at carsar in a bit more detail, so the villains and risk factors, the investigation, management and control, and the goals of treatment. So calf rearing, what are we trying to achieve? So I think as farm vets, it's really important to understand, what our clients are trying to get out of their business.
So obviously, in the dairy industry, we are, what they're selling is milk. So our aim of calf rearing is to produce a nice, healthy, productive animal. So we want our heifers, our first lactation heifers, to carve in at 23 to 24 months, and we want them to live happy, long, healthy lives.
So what do we need to achieve that? So for our calves, we obviously, carving them in at 24 months is quite young, so we need them to grow well, so they hit puberty at the right age. So generally, we want them to grow at around over 0.8 kg per day.
We need low disease rates. We want to maintain high welfare standards, and we want to do this as efficiently as possible. So this is another poll question.
I just wanted to see, so the question is, in the UK dairy herds, what is the average cost to rear a heifer from births calving. So you've got A 800 pounds, B 1300 pounds, and C 1800 pounds. So I can see there's a little bit of deliberation over this question.
More than half of you have voted now, so I'll give you another few seconds for the other half to just decide. Again, if you're not quite sure, just have a, have a stab at it. OK, right, so we'll end the voting there.
Ooh, we've got a joint tie. So we've got in first place with 44% of the vote each, we've got B and C, followed by 13% of the vote going for A. Brilliant, thank you.
So the correct answer in here, in the UK the average is 1800 pounds. So it's quite a lot of money and it's actually the second highest costs on a dairy farm, secondly, to feed. And I think as new grads, probably calf really is a great thing to get involved with because there's a huge variation in how much farmers spend to get their heifers to first patients.
So the range in this study was actually from 1000 pounds to 3000 pounds. So potentially your input could have a massive saving for those farmers if you can improve that efficiency. And also, a lot of what, how well calves do is to do with management, so it's not necessarily gonna take a load of infrastructure changes and a lot of money to improve our calf health and productivity.
So, I just want to stress this thing about age at first carving, because it's really important. So we always, our main target probably for heifers is that we want to carve them in at 23 to 24 months. So we need to think about baby calves, because to get them to carve in at 23 to 24 months, we need them to grow at a reasonable rate so that it hit puberty at the right age.
But why is that 23 to 24 months age at first carving so important? This has been studied really widely, and, The main benefits are obviously increased production. If you're carving your heifers down at 2 years, as opposed to 3 years, you've obviously got a year's extra worth of milk there because that heifer would have been milking post-calving, compared to the one that's calving in at 3 years.
You've also got increased longevity, so they've found that you've got better survival rates to third lactation in heifers that carve down at the correct time. So that 23 to 24 month window compared to heifers that carve down over 27 months. And that's probably to do with the condition of heifers when they're carving.
So often when heifers are older when they're carving, they'll have put on weight, they might be in, high body condition score, and that makes them more at risk of post-calving disease. And then finally reduced cost, so every day over 24 months, a heifer calves in, farmers are spending approximately 2.2 pounds 80 a day.
So obviously, if you carve at 24 months as as opposed to 30 months, that's a lot of days of 2 pounds 80 you save, so it is actually cheaper for farmers to carve them in earlier. So there's a huge amount of benefit to carving them in at that time, and what we do with young calves affects how they perform in later life. So this neonatal calf management is really, really important.
So just to make sure everyone's listening, I'm gonna do another whole question. What is the target daily daily live weight gain and age at first calving for dairy heifers? Is it A 0.6 kgs and 28 months, B more than 0.6 kgs and 23 to 24 months, C, more than 0.8 kg and 23 to 24 months, or D, more than 0.8 kg 28 months.
Again, I can see a few, a few just thinking about the answer to this. So I'll just give you a couple more seconds. And There we go.
OK, so, clear winner here with 76% of the vote is answer C, followed by B, 18% have gone for B and then 6% for D and nobody for A. That's brilliant. That's great, guys.
Everyone who answered C, that's correct. So more than 0.8 kg and 23 to 24 months.
That means I'm not rushing through things too quickly and you have heard what I've been saying, so that's good. So the next thing, I want to just move on to why does disease matter. So obviously, as farm vets or as vets in general, we always want to think of animal welfare and obviously disease, freedom from disease is one of your five freedoms.
So disease is an animal welfare concern, so we want to reduce it as much as possible. They're also not great for the team morale, so human welfare, it's not farmers care about their animals, and it can be extremely disheartening when you see an outbreak of scour go through a group of calves, and you're constantly chasing that disease, treating more and more calves. It takes a lot of time, so it can have a real impact on the team morale, on the farm.
There's obviously costs associated with disease. Now, these can be obvious in the form of deaths. So the value of that calf, you've completely lost.
You've also got treatment costs. Again, they're quite easy to measure. They'll know what they spend on a bottle of Zatran or Metaam and how much they dose each calf.
So treatment costs are obviously a part of it. But then you've got harder things to measure, so time cost. So as I said, treating a scan outbreak can be incredibly time consuming because you're often administering oral rehydration therapy.
And if you're doing that to a large number of cars, it can take a lot of time. So there's a time cost in there as well. Antibiotic usage, obviously, we want to reduce this as much as possible, and if you've got high rates of pneumonia, even scour, you may be using more antibiotics, and the more antibiotics we use, the more there is risk of, antibiotic resistance.
And we should be really trying to drive that antibiotic usage down as much as possible. And then in terms of cluster there's more difficult things to measure, so reduced performance. And this will be the effect potentially on growth rates.
So if you have an outbreak of scour, obviously you'll have a reduction in growth rates at the time when they're scouring and they may might not be eating quite so much. But that'll actually persist for potentially a couple of weeks after that case of disease because the gut needs to regenerate and become efficient at absorbing those nutrients again. And it's what effect does that have on those cars in future life?
We know that high growth rates in that early stage of life are associated with greater, a slight uplift in milk yield, in first lactation. So potentially this could be affecting them in their milking life as well. So future losses, and these would be the hardest to calculate and the hardest to study as well because you have to track animals for such a long time.
But there's more and more work being done on disease and how it affects the production. So I Gonna move on to treatment costs, sorry, to disease costs here and I just wanted to give you a ballpark estimate on cost of a case of scour and a cost of a case of pneumonia. So these costs are based on the at the time cost, so the treatment cost, the at the time loss in daily live weight gain, and the time cost.
So for a case of scour, it's estimated at around 65 pounds, . And it's actually higher in beef calves. I think it's around 80 pounds in beef calves, so it's quite an expensive disease.
And for pneumonia, that's a horrible looking lung. So I'm sure you, you guys will recognise the light pink bit at the top left of the screen is the healthy lung and the big dark red bit is very flats lung, basically, diseased lung. So on here, this study, it found that a case of pneumonia for that at the time cost is £43.
And actually, I thought that sounded quite low. When you see pneumonia outbreaks in cards, you can see that those cards generally will struggle as they go on. So a lot of the costs associated with pneumonia, you would think would be future costs.
There have been some studies that have looked at this. Now when you think of a dairy cow, on this image here, you've got the area where their lung would occupy. As you can see, compared to its body, the lung is actually quite small.
And if you think of a high yielding dairy cow as an athlete, so some dairy cows might be giving 50, 60, 70 litres a day, they need an incredibly high metabolic rate to produce all that milk, and the metabolism needs oxygen. So you need a good set of lungs to supply the oxygen to keep that metabolism going. So if you have a case of pneumonia when they're a calf and you get, disease which causes some scarring, and for instance, you lose the bottom third of that lung, is scar tissue and not, you're not getting oxygen transfer in that area.
That is going to affect how well they mi milk in future life. And there have been studies done into this now to try and look at those future losses, and it's quite remarkable. So, They've shown that one, this is a single case of pneumonia in that early life, has been linked to delayed age at first calving.
4% reduction in first lactation yield. An 8% reduction in second lactation yield and reduced longevity. So actually, when you include these future costs, potentially a case of pneumonia could be costing in the region of about 1000 pounds per case.
So there are huge costs associated with it. So what influences calf health? So generally, calf health and disease is governed by a number of factors, and whether you have, very healthy calves or disease outbreak, is generally caused by a number of things, not just one problem.
So we can divide these factors into three groups. So you've got calf factors, the environment, and pathogen factors. So your calf factors are generally related to the immunity of the calf, so what is that calf's ability to fight disease?
And obviously in very young calves, clam status is really important with their immune status. We can give them vaccines to try and protect calves, from disease. Age will govern also how susceptible they are to different diseases, their nutritional status, so if we're not feeding them enough, they'll probably be more susceptible to disease as the immune system obviously requires energy to power it.
The next group you'd look at would be the environment. So what challenges are we putting on that calf? So things like temperature, so obviously cold temperatures, the calf will need to use more energy to keep warm, and that could make it more susceptible to disease.
Rafts and wind speed, humidity, so bugs like to live in warm, humid, environments, so that might increase the amount of bugs in the environment. Ventilation, bedding, stocking density, all these things could potentially have an impact on car health. And then finally, the pathogen factors.
So that's looking at what specific bugs are present on the farm, you're, you're looking at. So things like, for instance, like crypto, you might have a, outbreak of disease where a lot of calves are affected and it's quite severe signs, whereas if you've got rotavirus, again, you might have a lot of cars affected, but it might not be quite so severe. So different bugs will work in different ways.
So, how are you going to approach a calf health visit? So when you graduate, you might get called to say you've got an outbreak of scour, how are you gonna go about investigating that, and trying to come up with an action plan? So I just thought I'd show you some pictures of some farms, that I've been to.
So these are obviously two farms that are using individual hutches. So the farm on the right is, the calves are housed on hardcore. It's quite hard to see there, but it's not a, concrete floor that has changes in terms of disinfection.
The calves are on their own in that image, but they're now in pairs. They're fed whole milk. They don't get vaccinated.
It's an all year round calving herd. The farm on the left, again hutches, individual calves, they're fed a high protein calf powder, they're kept in the individual hutches for post-weaning. They get rotove Corona for the dry cows and they get a respiratory vaccine for themselves.
You've got older systems, so, obviously, older housing can again pose challenges of disinfection. So if you've got wooden, barriers and, non-concrete floor, that can be very difficult sometimes to get rid of all the bugs. And then you've got group housing.
So this farm houses groups of about 20 to 30 calves. They're on a automatic feeder, milk feeder, so they're fed milk replacer on an ad lib basis. Now this group is a group which constantly have calves entering and leaving, so it has no rest period.
So again, you've got to think about the challenges that poses. And then you've obviously got seasonal calving systems, there's not quite so many in the UK as other countries. But we do have, I think about 25% of dairy herds in the UK are seasonal calving.
Now, these pose challenges and benefits in their own way. This is a really nice farm, actually, and you can see this is their set up at the start of the calving season. And obviously at the start of the calving season, when there's, the buildings have had a long time to rest, there's potentially a lot less disease challenge than on an all year round calving, system.
Whereas towards, when you get into peak carving or towards the end of the calving season, the disease burden is likely to have built up, and it's how you manage that. So in summary, there is a huge amount of variation in management from feeding, housing, grouping, vaccines, bugs. No, farms just don't fit the same bill, so you have to approach them, and be as thorough as possible basically when you're doing your investigation because you don't want to miss anything.
Also, disease and poor performance is often multifactorial. So you might go on farm and think that's the problem. They are leaving their calves with their cows for too long, after calving, and that's the problem.
But you need to make sure you cover all the bases, because that could be a problem, and you fix that, and you don't see the results you want because there's lots of other things impacting on disease. So I can't stress this enough, you need to be thorough when you're doing a calf health visit. So go through everything.
Don't just focus on one area, try and cover all the bases and make sure you're lining everything up how it should be. You want to involve the whole calf rearing team, so there's often multiple people involved with calf rearing, especially on bigger farms, and you wanna make sure there's as much consistency as possible and that you get buy in to any advice that you make. If you have everyone there when you go and do the visit, it's much better because then you firstly you haven't got to repeat anything.
You address any confusion between practises and how different people are doing things. So it's much better to try and get anyone who's dealing with the cars involved with the half health investigation from the start. You want to report your findings and set a clear action plan, so when I go and do a calf health visit, I would, collect all my information, go away, have a discussion with them, obviously, go away, set out a report, and then I'd probably go back and discuss, discuss the findings in person, and then you can agree actions coming out of it, that are achievable for the farm.
You want to monitor progress and see how they've done with those applied actions, and then go and revisit. So make sure you go back. Obviously, if there's been improvements and there are, the cars are healthier, they're performing better, you want to reinforce that's brilliant work.
So definitely revisit and see how things are going. So this is how I'd go about a calf health visit. Now, I've been vetting for a reasonable amount of time now, and I still take a checklist with me to go and do a visit.
So this is something I've put together myself. I did it probably in my first or 2nd year of practise, and I've gradually added. To it as I've gone through.
And it just has a list of questions, in different areas of calf management, which I ask every farm, that's having a calf disease outbreak or the calves aren't performing quite so well. It just makes sure you cover all those areas, whether they're calf factors, environment factors, or pathogen factors. So the areas my checklist covers are the calving yard, so looking at things like stocking density, how long the calf is left with the cow, how often the carving yard's cleaned out, and what disinfectant they're using.
I'd look at cluster management, as obviously that's key for the immunity of young calves. I'd look at navel management. The feeding regime, so asking about what milk powder they're feeding, what mixing rate they're using, how much volume they're feeding, how are they weaning, are there any stresses around weaning, and really getting into detail about that.
You look at the housing, so obviously assessing things like ventilation, are the beds wet, what are the stocking rates, There's loads of things to look at in terms of housing. Then you'd ask them about any vaccinations they're using, and are they giving them in the correct way? Are they storing them correctly, are they administering them correctly?
And then any treatment records and protocols for different diseases. Now there are resources out there to help you with this. So MSD have produced quite a lot of calf resources, and they have actually got a checklist online.
So that might be a good starting point for you. I get onto their website and have a look at some of those resources, and you could start putting together a checklist of your own. I have a calf health toolkit.
And it sounds very geeky again, but I find it very useful to have everything in one place when I go and do a calf health visit. So in that toolkit, I'd have blood tubes, for taking bloods for Clostrum, testing, passive transfer testing. I have a BRICS refractometer and I'll come on to what that does later in the discussion.
I have some smoke bombs in there for looking at ventilation. A set of scales for weighing the milk powder, and checking that what they think they're feeding is actually what they are feeding. I'd have some sample pots for collecting any samples, if it's scouring cars, for instance.
I'd have some test kits for scour because it's quite nice to demonstrate straight away to farmers what bugs potentially are in that scour sample. And then there's some more fancy bits of kit at the top there. So the, the yellow instrument is a anonometer, that's how you say it.
So that measures wind speed. So you'd be looking at whether there are any draughts at calf height. And then finally, the piece of equipment on the right is an ATP machine, and that's quite good for looking at the hygiene of, say, half buckets or calf feeding equipment, so you can swab it and it will give you a reading.
So how would you approach it? So first of all, how is the farmer going to present the problem to you? So the simple thing would be they'd call you up and say, I've got a couple of calves scouring what to do, but it can present in different ways.
Calves just aren't doing so well, or I've got a problem with pneumonia even in young cars, and they're just flat out and blowing. So sometimes farmers might, misdiagnose a problem. So, for instance, for young cars which are flat out, they're less than a week, it's probably not going to be, pneumonia, unless they've aspirated.
So potentially with something like that, I'd be thinking about E. Coli. So, Don't always assume what the farmer is telling you is totally correct.
I would just ask a few more questions to make sure they are, they are interpreting what they're seeing correctly and obviously you'd be going out to have a look. We've got another whole question here, what percentage of calves in the UK are treated for scour? Is it A 8%, B 15%, or C 25%?
OK, 2/3 of you have voted already, I'll just give you a couple more seconds for the last few just to. Have a go. OK, right, I'll close it there.
OK. So, in the lead with 45%, we've got C 25%. We've got 29% of respondents have gone for B and 24% for A.
So CBA is all. Thank you. So this was from data from the Welsh Young stock project.
So it's looking at dairy farms in Wales predominantly, but they're pretty representative of dairy farms in the whole of the UK. And the respondents from that suggested that 25% of calves are treated with scour, so it is the higher end, there's definitely room for improvement on how we're managing this disease. And it is the leading cause of death, in pre-weaned calves, so it's a, a really costly disease.
So first and foremost, I suppose, like with any clinical question, if you've got an outbreak of disease, you want to collect an initial history. So what questions are important to ask? So what are the signs that they're seeing, I know it sounds stupid, but it is quite good to really specify what the problem is they're seeing.
So for instance, the card's blowing, you'd want to ask a little bit more about. Is the scour, have they seen any scour around that age group? Does the calf, are they dying very quickly, So yeah, really specify what they're seeing.
When does it occur? So what age are the cars when they're getting disease? And this is really important because different bugs affect different ages of cars.
So, you can get a good idea of what might be causing the problem based on the age. How long has the current disease outbreak been going on? How many cars have had diarrhoea, so you want to find out the number and the percentage, so you've got an idea of morbidity.
And then how many calves have died. Again, this is important so you know, the severity of the outbreak, but also potentially what bugs might be involved as obviously some bugs are more pathogenic than others. And then have there been any recent changes in management?
I think this is a really important question. Things like the calf era has changed, or they've changed the milk powder, it might be that they're having a dietary problem and the calves are scouring. It's not a pathogenic problem, it's just that they've changed the milk powder.
So those would be, if even if a farmer called me up over the phone, those would be the, I would always ask those questions as an initial history gathering. So what causes scour, so these are the main bugs in young calves, or in neonatal calves. So the first one to arrive is generally E.
Coli. So if you tend to see that from 0 to 5 days, you can get it up to 7 days. It can be quite aggressive.
You will have, if you've got calves dying in the first day or two of life, E. Coli would probably be top of the list there. And that's the one that can present like pneumonia because they go toxic.
So they might be, the first thing a farmer sees is that the path is flat out on its side and blow breathing very fast. I think it's a pneumonia, but actually it's just a toxic path with E. Coli.
The next time you want to join the party are rotavirus and coronavirus. So they'll be in the first week of life, up to 2 weeks of life, very common bugs again in the, in the environment. Then you've got cryptosporidium.
So the earliest you tend to see that is about 1 week of age, and you can see it up to 3 weeks. I would say most commonly we see it between 1 to 2 weeks. It does seem to be quite an early disease.
And then salmonella, you can get that, or you can get it whenever, but generally it's from 1 week plus. And then you've obviously got copy coming in, but that's generally a little bit later and you wouldn't see it before 3 weeks. It's usually seen around weaning more like that 89, 10 weeks of age, when they start to eat a bit more corn and they're not on as much milk.
So, how can we find out what the bug is? There's nice testing equipment that we can take out on farm now and demonstrate to the farmer straight away, take a sample and show, show them what bugs are in the muck. And I'd say in terms of a scour investigation, it is really important to identify what bug is there.
And this is just from a management perspective, and also from a treatment perspective. So if you can make a diagnosis, I like, that would be better. So we use loads of these scour kits, they're called rainbow scour kits, and basically you take a sample, put it into this liquid container, shake it up.
Put it in the middle of the tube, which is there, and then screw the lid on. I'm sure you've probably seen, seen some of these. And where that green strip is, that says cryptosbrium, the next one says E.
Coli, and then round the other side there's a rotavirus one and a coronavirus one. And what happens is the fluid gets sucked up these, bits of philtre paper and you've got, red lines to indicate whether the test has worked and if it's a positive result. So if it's a, if the test has worked, you'll have one line at the top.
And if it's a positive result, you'll have another line lower down. So as you can see on that test there, you've got a positive crypto results, that one on the right, you've got two lines, and you can see that that's crypto, whereas the E. Coli has one indicating it is.
That's not present in that power sample. And you don't really use that on count calves less than one month. You could obviously use it on calves older, but it's just a bit more difficult to interpret the results, because if you find rotavirus, it's probably not significant, and those bugs become less significant as the calves get older.
Other tests you can do to try and find out what, what, what's causing the scour are coxy counts or fecale counts. So you can see there you can do this in-house. We've taken a muck sample and you.
Mix this up with a sugar salt solution and then you do a flotation method and have a look for coxy and worm eggs. It's really quick test again. And then finally, you might want to take a sample and send it to the lab for things like, bacteriology.
So if you want to do a salmonella culture. And also, if you've had, if you've got scouring cards and you've had a lot of negatives on the, scar rapid kits, you can, send them to the lab for a crypto, identification because it's got an increased sensitivity at the lab. Right, so, next poll question, which is the most common cause of scour in pre-weaned calves?
Is it A E. Coli? B cryptosporidium, C rotavirus, or D, salmonella.
Oh, some quick decisions here. OK, more than half have voted already, so I'll just give you a couple more. Seconds to think about it.
And we've got a clear winner already. OK, right, we'll close the voting there. So, clear winner with 50% of the vote was A.
E. Coli. Second with 31% was C, rotavirus, then we had crypto 13%, and salmonella for 6%.
OK, so interesting results there. So again, on the Welsh You stock project, so this is where they looked at dairy farms in Wales. They did scour, they, well, they took samples from any scouring calves, and in about 75% of the samples, they found cryptosporidium, rotavirus was the, second most common pathogen identified.
So, and that's supported by other literature. So generally crypto is the most common cause of scour for calves in the pre-wean period. And I would say that reflects exactly what we see out in practise.
The biggest problem our farms seem to suffer with is cryptosporidium. It's really, really common. And I think mainly because it's quite difficult to get rid of in the environment.
So the eggs are very, very resilient. They don't respond to standard disinfectants, won't kill them. So you need to make sure you're disinfecting with the right things, and they can get really high buildup of those eggs in the environment.
If you're testing for what bugs are in the muck, or what's causing the scour, I, I've just put an example here of what cars you'd want to sample, so I try to go for cars pre-treatment. So, for example, if you're sending a sample off for salmonella culture, you probably don't want to send samples from calves that have been treated with antibiotics because that would reduce the sensitivity of that testing. So, get samples from cars pre-treatment when they've just started showing clinical signs and they want to be representative of the current outbreak.
So if calves are generally scouring around 2 weeks of age. You'd want to sample a calf that started scouring it around 2 weeks of age rather than getting a sample of an 8 week old calf that started scouring. So representative of the current outbreak.
If you've got a lot of calf scouring, I would tend to pull up to 3 calves, just to keep the cost down of the testing. So, controlling calf scour, so we've gone through all, obviously there's a lot of factors that contribute to disease, and whether we see disease is generally, a balance between the degree of challenge versus the calf's immunity to prevent it. So we want to boost the calves immunity and reduce the challenge.
Now when it comes to calf out, this really can be changed into hygiene and colostrum. So hygiene of the calving yard, the calf pens, and then the colostrum status of the calves. So I'm gonna start by talking a bit about hygiene.
So we need to think about this from carving yard to calf housing. So the carving yard is often overlooked. So this is quite a nice example of individual carving pens.
You can see they look very, very clean. You'd imagine that the, pathogen load in that environment would be very low. This calving yard is clearly very overstocked, so I'd be worried, it looks like there's lots of nice fresh bedding down there, but pathogen load is going to get high very, very quickly.
You'd be asking questions about stocking rates, what is the yoni status of the herd, and are yoni's cows allowed to go into the calving yard? Sick cows are allowed to go into the calving yard? How often is it cleaned out and how long does the calf remain on the cow?
The next place to look is looking at the calf housing. So I'd say a newborn calf should always enter a clean and disinfected pen, as newborns are obviously the most susceptible to disease because they have very little immunity. So we need to make sure they're going into a clean environment in that 1st 24 hours.
And then what's often overlooked is the mode of transport between the two. So making sure that this is nice and clean and it's clean between calves. So often people will use a wheelbarrow, obviously if that's filthy or used for mucking out the calf pens, there's going to be a chance for bacteria to be transferred on the navel or for them to pick up.
So, just talking a little bit about disinfectants, and I won't bore you with this for too long, but as I said, we need to make sure farmers are using appropriate disinfectants, and this becomes particularly important if they've got cryptospiliosis, as the eggs are really, really resistant. So there are some disinfectants out there that are, which will work against crypto. So things like cyclics and kinacos are pretty effective.
They have specific mixing rates and recommended contact times for them to work. So if they are using products like this, it's worth checking how they're mixing it and how they're applying it. To make sure they're getting the most out of the product.
The group or not to group. So, as I discussed, a lot of farms manage calves in different ways. So you've obviously got individual hutches, which goes from a disease management point of view, have a lot of benefits because each calf will hopefully go into a clean pen, as you'd hope they'd be disinfecting pens between calves.
However, there is a push, and there are definitely benefits to social housing of cars, so either in pairs or in groups. So benefits in terms of dry matter intake, how they cope with weaning, how they cope with other stresses, and coping with, socialisation later in life. So I would say generally, housing cars in pairs or in groups from birth would be, desirable.
However, if you've got a scour outbreak, you just need to make sure that's done in the correct way. So generally, I would say. The newborn calves, if they're going into groups or into pairs, you want the age difference when they go into the group, be no more than 2 to 3 days.
So, for instance, if you've got newborns going into groups of 5, and when the oldest calf in the group is 7 days of age, when the baby calf goes in, that pen is going to be quite contaminated by the time that new calf goes in, and their chance of getting scour will be increased. Whereas if you've got a group of 5 and the oldest calf is. 3 days or 1 day in a blocked carving system, for instance, it's absolutely fine to put those 5 calves together because their age is, their age difference is so tight and that environment will be very clean when all of those calves go in.
So it will depend a little bit on the herd size, as to the group size from birth, and whether they can get away with pairs or or they need to stick with individuals or they can put them in groups. Generally, as a rule, I'd say key to groups to less than 12 for calves, . It just means that farmers can pick up disease easier, when you've got smaller groups, you can, you can notice if a calf isn't drinking or if you sitting back, whereas if it starts to get larger than this, it just comes a little bit more difficult.
So these are other hygiene options. So this is to do with the feed. So you're not just looking at the environment, you want to look at how they're feeding the calves.
And these are two quite nice, cheap options, for improving the hygiene. So making sure, concentrate is offered from day one, day two, and this is quite a nice way to do it where it's been put into, a blue barrel with a hole cut in the side, so it's elevated off the floor, so the risk of faecal contamination is reduced. And also got good access to the feed.
Again, we want them to have a source of fibre separate to the bedding. Halves want to eat fibre, they will want to nibble on some fibre. So we really don't want that to be the floor, straw because again, that's where the muck is gonna be and where potentially bugs like E.
Coli, rotavirus, crypto will be living. So having a elevated source of fibre is really important. And then finally, looking at the calf buckets.
So, have a, this is probably one thing that farms do fall down on quite a lot. The calf buckets need to be cleaned, I would say, at an absolute minimum daily, ideally after each feed. And you can look in some buckets on farms, and they are filthy.
And you just think milk is a great, medium for growing bacteria. So going around and having a look at the calf feet buckets and asking the farmer, would you drink out of that? And I think that's what we're doing here, my colleague's taking it very seriously.
So if we've moved on from hygiene, we're now looking at how can we support the calves, and boost their immune system. So in baby calves, the most important thing is really colostrum, and we call it liquid gold, because it really is, such a crucial, part of their nutrition, early life nutrition and immune system. So it contains antibodies, as we all know, and that's how we measure the pattern transfer.
It also contains loads loads of other good stuff, so things like antimicrobial factors, growth factors, nutrients. And these will all help, firstly, with the nutrition of the calf, but also with preventing disease. It's important to remember that in cows, you don't have antibodies crossing the placenta.
So when they're born, they don't have any antibodies. So we need to transfer that through the claustrum, before the calf can get to the age where they can start producing its own antibodies. So lostrum is really, really crucial in calves.
So what are our targets for lossom management, and how do we get it right? So here's just a representative, I'm sure you've all heard of the three Qs of Colostrum management. So firstly, quality, which is represented there by the BRI refractometer.
So that measures the quality of colostrum. You've got quantity, you've got on the jug there, generally we'd recommend giving 10% of body weight, which for a 40 kg dairy heifer would generally work out as 4 litres at the first feed. You want to do it quickly, so as soon as possible after birth, but I would always try to get it in before 4 hours.
And then the last thing is cleanly. So you don't really want to be feeding calves a load of bacteria at their first feed for two reasons. Obviously, it could, you're putting E.
Coli in there, you could get, an E. Coli toxaemia. But secondly, any bacteria that are in that milk or in that cluster will actually bind up with the absorption sites in the gut, and they actually reduce the calves' ability to absorb the antibodies.
So they'll get oropathy transfer if you're feeding them dirty. So why do we want to feed clustering quickly? So this graph here represents the calves' ability to absorb immunoglobulins over time.
So along the horizontal axis, you've got time, hours after birth. So at the left-hand side you've got 0, so at the point of birth, and then the right-hand side you've got 30 hours after birth. And as you can see, the ability to absorb immunoglobulins reduces rapidly in those 1st 6 hours, and then it gradually tails off to 24 hours where there's virtually no absorption of immunoglobulins.
This is why we say you need to get it in as quick as possible, so. 4 hours, 6 hours, as soon as possible. You've got to be realistic with what the farm can achieve, but I think 4 hours is a realistic aim for most farms.
Next one's lotrom quality. So obviously, if you're feeding 4 litres of very high quality lostrum, that will give more antibodies to a calf when you'll feed them if you fed 4 litres of poor quality clostrum, which has less antibodies in it. So we need to monitor the quality, to check that the lostrum we're feeding is good enough for The calves.
So when we're monitoring classroom quality, there's a couple of pieces of equipment we can use a 3 fractometer or a colostrometer. And this here on the right hand side is looking at the quality of colostrum, the cow produces and the time post calving. So across the bottom axis, you've got time post-carving, so at 0 hours, so when she carves up to 35 hours, so a day and a half, post-carving.
And you can see that straight after carving, so by 2 hours if the claustrum's collected then, the amount of immunoglobulins in that lostrum is very, very high. And then this reduces over time to when we get to 35 hours when the quatium is essentially milk. So during that time.
Essentially, the cow is just diluting it with water, so the main determinant of cluster and quality is the time after calving that it's collected off the cow. So not only do we want to give it quickly to the calf, we also want to get it off the cow as quickly as possible. Because that is the, what will determine how good it is.
But we need to test to make sure we have got good quality cost strength as things like nutrition can influence this as well. And then finally, cleanly, so how do you achieve this? There's some quite nice examples on here of what people are using on the farm.
So, in the top left hand corner, you've got a really simple carving setup. It's got a locking hedge yoke and a gate, and this is really helpful for carving cows, but also it's helpful for collecting colostrum if you've got a portable milker, like you can see on the right hand side at the top. Portable milkers are great if they're maintained well.
Obviously, if you're milking twice a day and a cow calves just at the end of your first milking, she's not going to get milked until the afternoon, which isn't ideal, given we've just looked at how quality reduces over time. So having a portable milker, would you allow you to collect lotrom off that cow as soon as possible after birth, and it also means she hasn't got to walk across concrete yards when she might be, more liable to slipping. In terms of administration, you've got some nice equipment down here which can help with cleanliness, and then you've got machines that will, pasteurise losh shrimp to reduce, the amount of bacteria in them.
So that's another option for trying to, reduce the bacterial count. So how long can we store colostrum? So it is important to recommend to farmers that they store colostrum.
And generally, I would say that colostrum, if they collect the lostrum in the parlour and it goes straight in the fridge, they might be able to store it for 2 days, a little bit longer. It depends how clean it was when they collected it. Bacteria double, the bacterial numbers in Clostrum double every 20 minutes.
So if Clostrum has been collected in the parlour and it's sat in the parlour for the 3 hours that milking has taken, that Clostrum probably can't be stored for 2 days in the fridge, because the bacterial count will be very, very high. Whereas if that Cloustrum has gone straight into the fridge as soon as it was collected, it might last for 3 days, for instance. So, It depends a little bit on how cleanly they collect it and how, how quickly they get it into a cool environment.
The other thing to stress is cover the claustrum in the parlour. So obviously, if you've got, an open milk jar, we all know how far, when a cow poos, how far it can spread. So you obviously want to cover it for things like transmission of yonies, but also that it affects that absorption of antibodies in the calf's gut, and you can transfer pathogenic bugs to the calf.
So get it covered. Use a clean dump dumpline and separate buckets, so don't use your mastitis, buckets to put your lashtrim into. You want to keep everything as clean as possible and separate from that sort of stuff.
The other thing is they can store clash in the freezer. So there is a bit, there was a very old study that said you can keep it for up to 12 months in a freezer. Generally, I recommend 6 months as they should get through it by then, as long as they're labelling up when it was collected and dating it and things like that, they should be able to get through a coloss from stores within 6 months.
So as a general protocol for farmers, you want to make sure that they're feeding 4 litres or 10% of body weight at the first feed. The quality, so on the brick refractometer, you'd want to be more than 22%. And for the speed of administration, I would always say ASAP.
So if you can get it in within 20 minutes, brilliant, but always within 4 hours of birth, and then do it as cleanly as possible. Secondary feed is important, but not quite as crucial as the first one, but I generally recommend another 2 litres of Colostrum in the next 12 hours. So we've looked at all the different checkpoints in terms of cluster management, then we want to test the result, and the best way to do this is to take bloods from your calves.
So this is a report that we run for our farmers. So we'll take bloods between 24 hours and 7 days of age, and we'll test the total protein. It's a fairly reliable way of looking at the success of passive transfer.
And what we want to see is results over 5.5 ideally. If it's over 5, it's pretty good, but we, we're pushing them up to 5.5.
As you can see, this farm's doing very, very well. It's very consistent results, and although there's some calves under target, none of them are dramatically low, and most are above 5. So we'll do this on a monthly basis, and I would recommend doing that as a monitoring tool, because you'll see if it drops off, you can start to ask questions about what's happened this month.
Has, the management changed in some way, has there been a higher rate of calving, or has, someone been on holiday, you'll see trends like that pretty quickly. So again, I've covered a couple of these, but tools that can help the tube on the left is called a trusty tuber. This is a really nice piece of equipment.
So ideally when calves drink clostrum, it would be through a teat, and bottle. However, 4 litres is quite a large volume that we're trying to get them to drink at that first feed, and farmers are busy. It takes a long time often for them to drink that.
If they won't drink the 4 litres of their own accord, I would suggest tubing it. And this is a really nice, tuber, because it's, it's got a guard on, so the bit at the end of the tube, has a guard, and then you feed the tube through the guard down the throat, like you can see on the calf, the cross section of the calf there. The tube is really, really nice and flexible.
So it's quite nice and gentle on the calves compared to some of the traditional feeders. So we really like these. You've also got the perfect other bags, which are in the top right hand corner.
So these are single-use claustrum, storage bags. So again, it's promoting that hygiene. You can write the date of collection, the bricks results on it, the cow number, they can be frozen and they defrost relatively quickly because they've got a large surface area.
And finally, the two bits at the bottom are a bricks refractometer, which measures quality, so good quality costume should be over 22%. And then you've got the lostrum density metre, which again you drop, well, for that you drop it in a sample of lostrum and you see, however, The further it sinks in, the poorer quality it is, the more it floats, the better quality it is. You've got like colours there to show whether it's good or bad.
We've got one more poll question here, which of the following is true? Sorry, they're a little bit wordy, but number one, ris refractomes are more reliable as their readings are not affected by temperature. 2, ri refractometers are not user friendly and are expensive, so farmers will not use them.
Number 3, Colostrum densim metres are quicker to use. And number 4, crushing denimters are more reliable as their readings are not affected by temperature. OK, so quite a lot to take in there and to consider, but already a lot of you have already cast your vote.
So I'll just give the final few an option, the choice to to just vote. Don't worry, remember it's completely anonymous, so just have a go if you're not sure. OK, we'll close it there.
Right, clear winner, 79% have gone for number one. Got 14% have gone for 3 and 7% gone for 2. So number one with 79% of the vote is our winner.
Well, thank you. So number one is the right answer. So Brits refractometers are more reliable, .
As their readings are not affected by temperature. So for your densimetters, they need to be doing kind of straight away. As a quastrum cools down, you might get falsely, high results.
So it will be more affected by the temperature of the quastrum. Bricks refractomes are relatively cheap, so I think we sell them for about 25, 30 quid to farmers, and they're really quick to use. You just take like a little squirt flush and put it on the dent on the, the refractometer plate and read it like a.
Through the, through the eyepiece. And yeah, dead quick and a little bit more accurate. So we, that's what we tend to use and our farmers have really adapted to them well.
They also don't break them as easily, so the density metres are glass, and they always seem to break, when you're using them on farm. So I just thought I'd mention pasteurisation quickly. So, generally, well, you've got two types of pasteurizer there, a batch pasteurizer and a, individual, colostrum.
You, you pasteurise it in individual samples. But for Colostrum, we generally, recommend doing it in individual cows, so keeping the sample set. And this will reduce the bacterial load of clot.
So you have to put it on a specific setting, otherwise you'll destroy all your immunoglobulins. So for 60 degrees for 60 minutes. And it's been found that at this temperature, for this amount of time, you will get a slight reduction in immunoglobulins, but because you kind of reduce the bacteria so low, the absorption of the qua the immunoglobulins that are left in the quashrum is more effective.
So actually the passive transfer in the end ends up being better. This isn't a replacement for good hygiene, and it is an expensive bit of kit, so we don't have a huge amount of farms using these, but in certain scenarios where you've got certain pathogens, for example, mycoplasma, it might be recommended to use something like this because you're stopping that kind of transmission young calves. And don't forget past our vaccines.
So there, there is a scour vaccine available for rotavirus coronavirus, and E. Coli. This is given to the cow at dry off or during the dry period.
So the immunity is transferred to the calf through the Colostrum. So it's good for for farms that have a diagnosis of either a virus, coronavirus or E. Coli scour.
And potentially having losses in the first week of life, but they must have good claustrum protocols in place because otherwise you're paying for a vaccine, and not getting any benefit out of it because you're not feeding the claustrum correctly. It's also a good vaccine for where, hygiene management is difficult, so it's not great, but in terms of if you're trying to manage a problem whilst, say, the calving yard needs extending and there's a high stocking density in there, so calves are picking up E. Coli, potentially, before you can move them into the calf pens.
This might be a good stopgap to try and mitigate for that extra, infection pressure on the calves. We've also got a really strong focus again on antibiotic reduction, so vaccination is a tool to try and facilitate this. So the final thing we're gonna come on to is treatment of scour.
So what are we trying to achieve with treatment? So we want to first and foremost is correct the fluid loss and correct the acidosis. This is probably the most important aspect of the treatment of calf scours, as this is what will make them really, really sick.
We obviously want to limit the effect on growth, as a side, and also clear the infection and reduce shedding if possible. So I'm gonna start with fluid therapy. So we want to correct the fluid loss, and you, there's a table here showing how you can assess the level of hydration or dehydration in calves.
So generally, if you've got eyeball recession, so some can I, your calf will be between 6 to 10% dehydrated. And whether you're toward the bottom end or the top end of this will depend on the degree of sunkenness or also to do with their mentation. So if they're a bit brighter, but they've got sun in their eye, they're probably more towards the 6 7% level.
Whereas if they're quite depressed and sunken in the eye, they're probably more towards the 89, 10% dehydrated. Once you get much higher than this, you'll have a collapsed calf, and they'll either be comatose, and then once you get above 12%, they are likely to die. So it does happen quite rapidly.
And what about acidosis? So acidosis is really important in car scour. Most scouring cars will get a degree of metabolic acidosis, .
It's associated, so in terms of clinical assessment of acidosis, we don't do many tests on farm to test the blood levels. So we're looking at clinical signs again, and things like recumbency and lack of a suckle reflex are thought to be associated with, a higher degree of acidosis. As a general rule, carves over 7 days of age will have a more severe acidosis than carbs less than 7 days of age, probably your biggest indicator if you've got a very.
So how do we correct, the fluid loss? So oral fluid therapy is a huge part of calf scour treatment on farm. So generally, you'd say if the calf is standing and it can suck, you just, oral fluid therapy is fine.
What I tend to recommend is 2 litres of oral rehydration therapy at least twice a day. So you're supplying 4 litres a day. So if they're 10% dehydrated, you're giving 10% of body weight, so 4 litres, but they are still losing during that time.
So ideally, if they can give 3 times 2 litres, that'd be great. Generally, 2 feeds is as much as they can manage. So go with that.
Separate it from your milk feeds. So if they're feeding whole milk or a skim milk powder, there is some, evidence that it can disrupt the clot formation in the Amazin. So ideally you want to feed your rehydration therapy separate to your milk feeds.
What I tend to recommend is giving it 2 hours prior to, the milk feed, and this gives them time to absorb that fluid. I think if they if you feed them just before you feed them milk, they probably won't want to drink their milk because they'll be full up. So give it two hours prior and then offer them milk still.
Do not add rehydration products to milk or milk powder. And the reason I say this is a lot of rehydration products are, hyper osmotic. So the osmolarity of, milk is probably around 400, whereas your rehydration products will be, that's cow's milk is around 400.
Milk replacer generally can be around 600, maybe potentially a little bit higher. And your rehydration products will be around 600. So if you add a rehydration product to your calf milk replacer, you're getting up to around 1000 mill moles per litre, which actually will end up drawing fluid into the gut rather than replacing the fluids they've lost, so you can make the situation worse.
So always feed it separately in water, not in milk powder. And then finally, make sure there's adli water available. Obviously the calves can help replace their fluid losses themselves, so have fresh water available to every calf.
There's some info here on which, what you're looking for in your rehydration therapy. So it is important to look, because when you start in practise, there'll be a lot of different options out there in terms of rehydration products, and some are better than others. So assess your rehydration products, check that they fit within these sorts of realms in terms of what, the constituents and the levels in there, and make sure you're picking a good one.
So IV fluid therapy, and generally this would be recommended if the calf is recumbent, so lay down, depressed and has a lack of a suckle reflex. So the farmer would call you and that would be when you'd want to give them IV fluids. As I said, if the calves are over a week of age and they're recumbent like this, they're likely to have severe acidosis, whereas under a week, the degree of acidosis will be much less.
So the fluid therapy you use is probably going to be slightly different to accommodate that. So in practise, we use sodium bicarbonate, the 8.4% solution, and administer it, at 5 to 10 mL per kilo for carbs over 7 days of age.
Now, people will do this differently at different practises, and what I'd recommend is reading the two papers at the bottom of this, this, this slide. There's a really good review articles on it. You need to apply, I suppose, the clinical situation and also, the practical situation of giving, IV fluids.
So if you've got a great car facility at your practise, where people can bring in carbs and you can monitor their IV drips, they're brilliant. Keeping them on an isotonic fluid would be great. If you don't, and you need to do it out on farm, it might be that you bolus them with a hypertonic solution and then follow it up with oral rehydration flu fluids.
So I will do a mixture of this, and it depends a little bit on the farmer, and their expertise and whether they are used to doing IV fluids with calves. So what you can do is either give your 8.5% bicarbonate and then follow it up with oral fluids, or you could give them an isotonic fluid volume expanding fluid, so something like sodium chloride, isotonic fluid, either prior to the sodium bicarb, if they're looking really sick, or spike that fluid with your sodium bicarb, so spike 5 litres of isotonic fluid with sodium bicarb, and administer it that way.
If they're less than 7 days of age, again, they're gonna have acidosis, but it won't be anywhere near as severe. So in this situation, the main thing you want to do is give an isotonic volume expanding fluid. And for this, in digrade White's paper, he actually gives a really nice way of making this up yourself.
So you can add 34 grammes of sodium chloride, to 15 grammes of sodium bicarbonate to 5 litres of boiled tap water, and administer that. With the course of say 12 hours to get there and try get the volume up. That's the bicarb we use.
This picture shows a calf that's actually having IV fluids, so it's a valve, vein, sorry, a valve. I've never done it myself. Yeah, it looks quite difficult.
But yeah, you just place a 22 gauge catheter into the vein in the ear, . Rather than into the jugular. So what else do we want to treat calves with?
So non-steroidals, these are recommended at the onset of scour, so not necessarily in a really dehydrated calf, but at the onset of scour, they've been shown to improve appetite. So you get a less of a reduction in daily live weight gain because they want to eat more and they feel. So I would recommend NSAIDS as part of your general scour protocol.
Milk feeding, some farmers will just withdraw milk. Generally, I would recommend not doing this, because there's actually no evidence that milk feeding, milk feeding increases the severity or duration of diarrhoea. You just starve the calves, but essentially.
So you want to continue to feed milk, and you'll get lesser reduction in daily live weight gain. However, if they won't drink it themselves, do not chew the milk, because you'll end up putting milk straight into the room and then creating more of a problem, than they were in the first place. So off the milk, don't tube it, but don't withdraw it.
And then the final aspect of treating scour is treating the bugs. So if we go back to what are the common bugs in calf scour, you've got a couple of bacteria, a couple of viruses, and a protozoa. So I suppose for the viral diarrhoea, all you want to do is give them supportive therapy, .
Whereas essentially with salmonella, you'd want to give them antibiotics, and with crypto, you might want to give them an irotozole. So it's really important to know what bugs are on your farms and what the general cause of scar is on a farm, because then you can recommend a protocol which either includes treatment for the, bug itself or not. So definitely test the scanner samples.
So this would be an example of scour treatment protocol that I give to a farmer. So you've got 3 different degrees of scour here. So mild scour would be a small volume of less and for less than 1 day, and the calve it right and seems OK in itself.
Otherwise, that might be a nutritional problem, so I kind of monitor it. It probably doesn't need any treatment at this stage, and just keep an eye on it. If it's moderate, so a larger volume and the calf is dull but able to stand, it might look a bit sunken in the eye, it might not.
At this stage, at the onset of scout, as I said, I give it meacam to keep those intakes up, give it oral rehydration fluids, and then depending on the likely cause of the scour, you would give it either an antibiotic or an anti-protozool, but you may not need that. And then finally, severe scour, so if the calf is unable to stand and very sunken eye, they can sort their vet as it may require IV fluids. Isolate scouring calves, and call the vet if multiple cases or no response to treatment.
And at the bottom there, I've given some instructions on oral rehydration therapy. So giving 2 litres of oral fluids twice a day, at least 2 hours prior to the next milk feed. OK, so we're reaching the end here, so a bit of a roundup.
We've been through, the cost of heifer rearing and what our targets are in terms of the age at first carving. So getting heifers to carving at 23 to 24 months has lots of benefits. We've gone through the cost of disease, both in terms of financial losses and welfare and morale.
And we've discussed the multifactorial nature of disease. We've discussed the variation in management of cars in the UK, which means, every situation you need to investigate thoroughly, because no two farms are the same. You need to involve the whole team to make sure you get buy-in, and you get the full picture, take the right equipment, so take your calf, assessment box with you.
Neonatal diarrhoea is very common in calves, and we've learned about the different bugs which are common for causing calf scour in that pre-weaning period. And we discussed the two biggest risk factors being pooroure management and poor hygiene. For hygiene, we need to be looking at from calving yard to calf housing and what's in between.
So a clear clustering protocol, and we've discussed the aims of our treatment, so fluids and supportive care. So, that is the end of the presentation for tonight. On this page we've just got the upcoming, discussions that are in the diary.
So make sure you put those, you take a note of those, if you want to. And enjoying those webinars as well. So I'd like to welcome any questions.
Thanks for getting involved with the polling. Great to see, an involvement like that. Great, thank you so much Sarah, that was a really, really interesting presentation put together really nicely, and I'm sure that everybody listening has found it really useful.
Just before we go to questions, we've got around 15 minutes for questions, so keep them, keep them coming in. We've already got a few here, but, you know, if you've got any, please put them in the Q&A box. Also, just to remind you, we do really value your feedback, on these sessions.
So before you sign off tonight, please just spare us 30 seconds and complete the feedback survey that should have popped up in a tab, . In your browser. If you can't actually see that survey sometimes it doesn't present itself on some, some systems, then please feel free to email us any feedback you've got to the BCVA office or let your BCVA student rep know as well.
As Sarah said, we've got a great plan, a programme. Of events coming up to Christmas. And this has been really based on your feedback.
So we really would like to, to hear more. We really do value it. So, we've got around 15 minutes for questions.
So, as I said, keep them coming in. But for now, we'll just go to our first one that's come in from Tom. Tom asks, do you find the farms that do block carving, tend to have better results in terms of calf health because of the factors such as less age mixing, easier management, as all carving at the same time, etc.
But then also you've got the caveat that you've got calf numbers would be higher, which would increase risk of disease and spread. So, so what do you find in terms of block versus all year round calving herds? I think that would be really dependent on the farm, so I wouldn't like to generalise and say block carvers are better at calf rearing than all year round carvers or the other way round.
Obviously there's challenges to both systems, . Having calves born in spring is good because generally, it's better in terms of the weather for calves than having calves born all year round. But as I say, the pressure on the team in a block calving system is, very high, they're very, very busy during the calving period.
And when things go wrong, they really can go wrong quite catastrophically, if you have an outbreak of disease. So it will vary year to year and farm to farm. I don't think you could generalise, but definitely towards the end of calving, those block calving systems have a lot of pressure on them in terms of calf disease, so you can see some problems then.
OK, brilliant. Another question then about grouping, and do you see more problems, with calves that are reared on, automatic feeders and therefore in larger groups and maybe a wider age range or and so conversely, do you see less in, in calves that are in individual, bucket fed systems? Yeah.
So I, I don't want to sound like I'm just skirting around the questions. I'm gonna, I'm gonna put my neck on the line and say, yes, I do think we see, more disease potentially in, automatic feeding systems as a general observation. And that's not to say automatic feeding systems can't work.
I just think people often, don't use them how they probably should. So for instance, Putting 30 calves on a teat and constantly moving calves in and out of that group is a very high risk of disease. Whereas if you had automatic feeders for groups of 12 calves and kept them in a static group.
You're going to see potentially a lot less disease. So it's not necessarily to do with the feeding apparatus, as I think automatic feeders do have a huge benefit in the terms of, the volumes of milk you can get into calves over multiple feeds. But it's potentially how those groups are managed, .
Individual calves, again, you can, when you've had individual housing, it does work well for disease control. You will still see problems in individually housed calves. But I do think pairing them up, or grouping them up is of benefit, as long as you can get on top of those hygiene factors and keep the age range really, really tight.
Yeah. So like, I suppose with most things, it, it comes back down to management, doesn't it? And, and how effective the management is on the farm.
A question then, again, about, individual calf feeding. Have you got any tips for preventing cross suckling? Or what do you do in a system where you've got lots of that going on?
OK, so. Cross sucking, do you mean like navel suckling, or do you mean, yeah, OK. So, if they're navel sucking, generally it's because they're hungry.
So I definitely look at, are they feeding enough milk? So when the pair housing recommendations were first implemented, I don't think there was a lot of guidance on how to do that. So ensuring calves are on a lot of the studies that they produced were based on calves which are on ad lib milk, .
So obviously there wasn't a lot of competition for milk in that system, whereas we don't have a huge amount of pear calves that would ever be on ad-lib milk. So ensuring we're feeding a high plane of nutrition will help reduce that cross suckling because the calf won't finish his milk and think I'm still hungry. I need to suck something.
So making sure they're feeding enough. There was also a study that was published, I think, I think it might have been a BCVA last year. It was a poster where they'd shown that bedding calves after feeding, would reduce cross suckling because they've got something to do, essentially.
So they'll drink their milk, you bed them and then they'll play with the bedding rather than sucking each other's navels. So that's another way to get around it. But I think if you manage it well, you will, you won't ever get rid of it.
But you will reduce the rates across the where it's managed. That that's interesting about the bedding. I, I wonder whether you'd have the same effect if you use one of these enrichment balls, that they tend to hang from the ceiling for the caster to play with.
I wonder whether that would have the same effect. Like essentially, although I think it's that new bedding going in straight after feeding, whereas I suppose the enrichment ball might be there all the time. It's just something new and interesting to play with, so I think that's probably why it works.
I mean, most people bed after feeding anyway, so it's an easy thing for them to do, if they're also their management, if they're not doing it. So I think, yeah, it's quite an interesting bit of advice and an interesting study. Great.
Well, we'll, we'll, we've got two more questions here. So one is just regarding, again, if anybody's got any questions they've been sitting on, and please use this opportunity to ask Sarah while we've got it. One question about the, the, what you mentioned regarding putting, red.
Fluid into milk. Does that apply to whole milk as well? And what about things such as the hydron gel that is specifically to be put in milk?
Would you advise just putting that in water, or would you advise moving away from a product like that? So I would apply it to whole milk as well, because again, whole milk has an odd morality to it. So whole milk's around, I think, 300 millimoles.
So obviously, putting a 600 millimo, product into that is going to up the osmoality quite a lot of that whole milk. And also you do disrupt that clot formation in the Abimazin, by adding electrolytes to your whole milk. So I would try and avoid that if you can.
. I do use some rehidon, but I would always use it in water. I know it's licenced to use in milk, but I can't see that the osmolarity is any different, for a product like that. And if the osmolarity is low enough that you can add it to milk, it potentially isn't a great product because you do want it to be a hyper osmotic product that you're giving for oral rehydration therapy.
Brilliant, thank you. And then we'll come on to the last question, which is probably just to to wrap up a, give an overview of of all your experience in dealing with calf problems. But what would you consider to be the most common problem or thing that isn't being done correctly on farm, when you're doing your investigations?
So what's the most common thing that you find isn't done properly and is contributing to calf scour? Oh, that is a really good question. .
What is the most common? Though I'd save a different question for last. .
Because people have learned a lot about Clostrum management, there's been a lot of talk about it, and I think farmers are really picking up on that cause I would initially think colostrum, . Potentially cars being left in on cows for quite a long time, and in the calving yard for quite a long time, obviously, cows. Are not susceptible to the bacteria and the bugs that they transmit in their faeces, whereas calves are very susceptible when they're born.
So that environment is actually quite a dangerous environment for the calves to be in. If it's a group calving yard, obviously it will depend on how they're managing their calving. So potentially leaving the calves in with the cows, or them having contact with the adult cows would probably be one of the main problems you'll see.
Brilliant. Thank you so much. So just before we finish up, when I say goodnight, just want to thank you again, Sarah, for giving up your time tonight.
And that was a really, really great clinical club. I hope that everyone listening has found it, useful. And as you'll see there on the, on the slide, you'll see that our monthly programme is gonna be continuing right up to Christmas, and we've got a range of clinical club topics like tonight.
We've also introducing Q&A panels, and also case discussions. So next month, Monday the 24th of August, again, same time 7:30, we've got Phil Elkins from the BCVA board taking you through, a number of interactive cases on transition disease. Then we'll be following that up in September with a Yoni's disease clinical Club with Karen Bond.
And then in October, we'll have further case discussions, with Jenny Hull, which will be diseases of the beef calf, again, in all interactive sessions. And then in November, and again, this has been, based on your feedback of what you, you would like to, to have from us. We've got a Q&A panel on careers.
So we've got 4 members of our board who have got a really varied, careers, to, to just answer your questions and give you some guidance for the future. In terms of keeping up to date, in terms of what we're doing, we are rolling out, more student, resources as well. So can I just make sure that you are going, that you, you make sure that you're up to date with those by joining our BCVA student group.
Now I've got more than 700 of you in that group. And this is where we'll be posting all of the links to the resources and posting all of the events as well. So if you haven't already, like our BCVA, Facebook page, and then search for the BCVA students only group and ask to join it.
And, we'll keep you updated from there. So, just again, Sarah, thanks so much, for that tonight. Really, really great clinical club.
And to everybody listening, we hope to see you next time on Monday, the 24th of August. And then, until then, good night and stay safe. Thank you.
