OK, Stacey, thank you very much indeed. Good afternoon, everyone. We're now changing species and starting to look at goats, and what I'm going to try and do over the next sort of 50, 55 minutes is just to consider some of the infectious diseases of goats and giving some practical tips on biosecurity, diagnosis, treatment, and control.
Before we get into the nitty gritty of it, there are a number of factors that we need to consider that are important, and I stress here I'm talking specifically about the UK for some of these, but within the UK itself, the population is relatively small, around 100,000. So as such, we're considering goats as a minor species. So what we have to do on a day to day basis, I'm afraid, is very much extrapolation from other ruminants as to how we recognise diseases, how we treat diseases, and how we control diseases.
So extrapolation is all important and as I say, a minor species. The minor species problem brings another issue, and this is the availability of licenced products for goats, again, stressing in the UK. Up until recently, that was the list of products with a marketing authorization for using goats in the UK.
So we had lethabarb and pentobarbital, both of which are barbiturates. We had oxytocin, we had Coxaac, which is the Q fever vaccine, and Goa, which is the Jonas disease vaccine, and the ever-present availability of sterilised water. So that was the list of products we had until recently.
We have no licenced antibiotics, wormers, flucoides, ectoparasiticides, analgesics, and anaesthetics. And as a result, our day to day use of any of these products was under the Cascade principle. Now I say had because this was a situation until the end of last year when we had the availability of Beryl.
Now, as I'm sure you're aware, Beryl is a fluoroquinolone and not necessarily the antibiotic that any of us would choose when we're treating a goat issue. So I think we, we put that to one side to a certain extent, and I'll perhaps come to that a little bit later on. And the other product that has made an appearance and again now with the marketing authorization for use in goats is Eprinex, the poor on epprinomectin.
And again, there are a couple of issues surrounding Eronex, which I'll again come on to in a moment. But overall, with any of these products that we're using, there's a lack really of pharmacokinetic data about how they are mobilised in goats. Very often, we're almost guessing at dose rates, hoping we're getting dose rates correct.
We, we're learning, I think, from each other, but this pharmacokinetic data is often lacking, and we apply sheep dose rates, we apply cattle dose rates. And to a certain extent, and sometimes I think we hope that we're doing it correctly, but there are some issues along the way. My next point is that it is a very diverse sector.
We have a large in the UK, very large dairy goat sector now with some herds up to 4000 females on one site and sometimes more. The majority of these are housed 24/7. They never see a blade of grass.
They're kept indoors, and I'll go into the reasons for that in a moment. We have a, a small meat goat sector. These are specialist units, with the Boer breed, the South African Boer breed, and now increasing number of holdings are rearing the dairy mails that are surplus to the dairy industry, and these are being reared and, and identifying markets, hopefully in the future in the supermarket chains.
We have a relatively small fibre industry based on the Angora and the cashmere goat, and really quite, quite important, I think, is the hobby sector, the, the sort of smallholder with a small number of pedigree goats, the show herds, and also, I think, equally of great importance of the number of goats kept as pets and kept at public attractions, and this brings in a whole range of other issues regarding zoonotic diseases and so on, but They are very friendly, very gregarious animals, and they actually enjoy the, the contact with humans, and this is what I think makes them very, very useful and very, very popular in, in public attractions. So really what I'm saying, I suppose, is that any advice that as a veterinary surgeon, we're giving about how to deal with an infectious disease in goats must be generic in principle, but must be adapted to each and every type of unit that I've described here. As I've said already, that there's going to be a lot of difference between someone with 2 or 3 goats in the backyard of a village pub to someone farming 4500 female dairy goats on one unit, and obviously a lot of different stop offs in between the two.
My next point is that there are a number of shared parasites between goats and other species, and particularly sheep, and this is a relatively common picture that I've got here, where we've got a group of goats and the two arrows here are showing two sheep. And what we must bear in mind, obviously, is although there are a lot of Although there are a lot of shared parasites between the species, the way that we deal with controlling nematode parasites in goats is going to be quite different to the way that we deal with controlling nematode parasites in sheep. So again, it isn't a blanket approach to controlling these parasites, and I'll come on to that again in a moment.
Moving on to another problem area, and this is within the laboratory, and this is obviously where my own background is. There are lab tests that aren't validated for use in goats, and the one that we have a particular problem with is our diagnosis of toxoplasma abortion, because the toxoplasma IFAT, the indirect fluorescent antibody test, That we commonly use on foetal fluid in aborted lambs. We simply cannot use in goats because we're using a sheep-specific monoclonal monoclonal antigen.
Now, the reason this is a problem, is that one of the issues that we have in investigating goat abortion problems is that goats actually consume their own placenta. They'll consume the placenta of other goats, that they're basically they're prey animals, so they try to clear up any evidence that they kidded. And more often than not, if we're receiving a collection of aborted foetuses from a goat abortion problem, we get what we see in the picture in front of me here, and these are the actual aborted goats themselves with little or no placenta.
If we have placenta, if we have coyleden, we can undertake the fluorescent antibody test, looking for antigen in the coilledden, but if we don't, we're slightly stuck. So it's really important at this stage, I think, to emphasise that if you're wanting to send material to a laboratory to investigate an abortion outbreak in a group of goats, It is more important than ever to try to ensure that you get the owner to hold some placenta back, including placenta with coileddens to accompany the foetuses themselves. So that's another issue there.
And again, we do lack validated reference ranges. Very often we apply a sheep reference range, we apply a cattle reference range, and we, we hope we get it right, and I think most often we do, but I do stress that some of these validated reference ranges need to be reviewed. So really the next step when dealing with any infectious disease is to develop a working knowledge of each infection relevant to goats.
And we need to consider the etiological agent, what we know about that. We need to be aware of roots of infection and reservoirs of infection. As I've already said, laboratory testing protocols that may be relevant to goats, often adapting these from, from, protocols relevant to other species.
Vaccine availability, minimal knowledge there, but I think a lot of it now is anecdotal. We're sharing information between members of the Veterinary Society and others, therapeutic agent availability and dose rates, and any available control programmes. So this is an important next step, I think, no matter what the species is, but obviously, we're focusing here on, on goats.
So there are many infectious diseases of goats in the UK. Obvious I can't cover all of these in 50 minutes, and what I'm going to try to do is to look at a few examples from each of the sort of categories of infectious diseases that that we come across in goats in the UK really based on, on their etopathogenesis. So what I'm going to look at really are some of the common infectious and contagious diseases.
So the classical infections passed directly or indirectly between goats and other species, looking at some of the iceberg infections, Yona's disease, looking at result diseases resulting from gut commensal proliferation, environmental source infections, and those coming from other species, such as Toxo, Eucinia and TB. So that's a sort of a broad brush approach to what I'm going to try to do for the remainder of this presentation. But just one final category to, to remind you of, in the, that goats are susceptible to notifiable diseases, and not to forget that this applies to all goats.
It isn't just farm goats susceptible to notifiable disease, but also our pet goats in garden centres and our pet goats kept on open farms and, and zoological collections and so on. The notifiable disease of foot and mouth disease and blunt blue tongue, the exotic diseases, and the ever present ones in the UK, scray and TB. So again, pet goats and farm goats, there's no difference between the two.
In the UK, all of them are considered to be farm animals, all are equally susceptible to notifiable disease. So I'm going to start by looking at problems related to worms, to, to nematode parasites and goats. And I think the important thing to stress right from the outset.
Is that unlike cattle and unlike sheep, goats never really develop the age-dependent immunity that we see in, in these other species. So a goat of 6 or 7 or 8 years of age that may have been exposed to worms throughout its life can still be affected with acute and severe parasitic gastroenteritis at 5 or 6 or 7 years of age, if it suddenly becomes exposed to a heavy infestation. So I think from a differential diagnostic point of view, if you have an adult goat with diarrhoea, I think you must always think the part of the possibility of acute PGE, particularly if these goats are in grass and forget the fact that, you know, they're, it's, it's an older goat, they're still going to be susceptible.
So as a result of this, they need to be wormed throughout their lives if they're at risk, not a blanket approach, but always considered worms throughout their lives. And this is the sole reason why the larger commercial dairy herds in the UK have gone down the route of housing 24/7. It simply is not sustainable to rear large numbers of goats, very often on limited amounts of grazing, with a background worm problem.
And when I worked in APHA in Carmarthen, we were looking at some of the developing commercial dairy goat herds in in that area, and we were literally seeing cyclical milk drops throughout the grazing season, coinciding with the life cycles of the parasites. So I think the decision was made by the commercial sector during its developmental stage that really they would focus on 24/7 housing. And obviously, this brings in another issue.
If there's a constant requirement to consider worms, consider worming. There's also the constant reminder of the need to be mindful of antalmenttic resistance. It's a constant concern.
So as I've already said, very often, particularly on small holdings, the grazing can be limited, and you can only, you know, very easily do the mathematics yourself. If you've got a goat that is potentially excreting 5000, 10,000, 15,000 nematode eggs per gramme of faeces, a fair amount of faeces comes out of each goat. If you've got 10 goats, multiply that by 10 in a small paddock area, it can very quickly become worm sick.
And this photograph here is of a boar goat unit that I dealt with up in Buckinghamshire. Their aspiration was to rear these goats organically, but after 2 years, this small amount of land that they had, these couple of paddocks that they had, became completely worm sick, and they were unable to fatten the goat kids and had to readjust to bring them into to fatten them basically away from the grass and away from the worms. So I think this, this availability of, grazing is, is another problem, particularly on the, the small holdings and small units.
And as I've already said, this is the reason that these larger herds are housed virtually all year round now, because there is no issue there with worms and obviously no need to, to worm them. So which nematodes are we concerned about? Well, this is the list of the common nematode parasites that we encounter in sheep and cattle, and we can basically extrapolate across whatever the worms are that cattle and sheep are potentially susceptible to, we can apply this to the goat as well.
So many shared parasites and going back to my previous slide, if you have a number of sheep and a number of goats together in the field, there's going to be cross infection between the two of them. So what I think we we need to make sure as veterinary surgeons is that we don't just blindly tell our clients that goats are susceptible to worms if they're grass, carry on worming them. We need to think very carefully about how we encourage them to undertake faecal leg count monitoring, testing for.
Practise laboratories via commercial laboratories. We can look at individual samples from sick goats. We can look at pooled samples, and the APHA approach was to take faeces samples from up to 10 goats within a group, and you get an average feedback then.
And obviously, if there's a, a need to worm these goats, then we go ahead and, and we worm them. But it's important not just to encourage owners to worm on a sort of a, a, a, an ad hoc basis, but to try to get some evidence behind the need to, to worm them. So, ensuring sensible use of anthomintics, yes, and, those of you are familiar with the Scots guidelines, sustainable control of parasites and sheep, there is mention of goats within the Scots guidelines, not a huge mention, but there is a mention of goats in there.
So the availability of anthelmintics in the UK until recently, none. We basically had no anthimintic that had a marketing authorization for using goats, using goats until recently. And what we were doing was to use the readily available antalmintics, principally for sheep, and applying the standard milk and meat withhold times under cascade principles.
So 7 days milk withhold and 28 days meat withhold. And then along came Eronex, which has caused us a, a few, or caused her perhaps to sort of think around the use of Eronex, and its place in the, the nematode control programmes that we put in place for, for goats. So why are we actually concerned about this?
Well, a number of reasons. As the only licenced product, should we even consider using any other wormer? Secondly, it has a nil milk withhold.
This makes it attractive to clients. If there's going to be an increased use, is there an increased risk of resistance? Thirdly, and again, just to emphasise, this has dual efficacy.
It isn't just used to control ectop endoparasites, but it's also used to control ectoparasites. So potentially we're increasing the risk of resistance if this is being used to control an endoparasite problem when there may not necessarily be a need to control an endoparasite problem. But fourthly, there's good evidence that we have that oral and thalintics have a proven greater efficacy and also a proven greater consistency than injectables or poons.
So I think the advice that we're giving at the moment through the goat Veterinary Society, is that we are mindful of the fact that Eronex is available, and obviously Eronex is a poon, it has a nil milk withhold time. I think those veterinary surgeons who in the past have used other antalmentics and have personal experience that these other analmentics are effective. They continue, are advised to continue using these, but again, applying the same cascade principles.
And just to, to expand on that, what we are mindful of is that we need to increase the dose rate of all of these products. So on the slide in front of you here, we have a list on the left-hand side there of the different groups of wormer that are currently available, and then we have the comparative dose rates for, for sheep and goats. So look, looking at the group 1 benzimidazole group, the recommendation for sheep is 5 milligrammes per kilogramme, and in goats, we need to double the dose rate to 10 milligrammes per kilogramme.
And we're basing this on some work that the more done did a few years ago. They did a worldwide reference review, and they looked at the available evidence there, and this, these were basically the conclusions they formed. So the Levanisol group, we're not doubling this, there's slightly more issue with, with toxicity, but we're going from 7.5 milligrammes per kilogramme up to 12 milligrammes per kilogramme.
And the, the group 3s, the ivermectins, the Doramectins, the amoxidectins, we're effectively doubling the dose rate. So going from 0.2 milligrammes per kilogramme up to 0.2 to 0.4, somewhere between the two.
And then the group for the monop Pantals again, some some more recent evidence here, and the recommendation for goats is that we are using this dose rated around 3.75 milligrammes per kilogramme, as opposed to the 2.5 milligrammes per kilogramme that we are currently recommended for use in sheep.
And again, quarantine dosing is is ever important. There's been a lot of emphasis in the last few years about the importance of ensuring that, particularly in the sheep sector, that incoming sheep are given quarantine dosing so that we're not bringing resistant worm loads onto the unit. And the current recommendation from the goat sector is that we, we basically follow the recommendations within the sheep sector, but obviously by increasing the dose rates as I've just been discussing.
So either using amoxidectin and 1.5 to 2 times the sheep dose, plus one of the POV products and either monopantal and again increasing the dose rate by 1.5 or the uantol, and the current recommendation is to keep the sheep dose, sorry, to keep the goat dose rate at the same level as the sheep dose rate.
So I'll leave that perhaps for a minute in case one needs to jot this down. But again, just to stress here that goatre Society recommendation is that we try to avoid the use of both monopantile and quantile. These are obviously the more recently available and fermented products.
Try to restrict these for daily routine worming dose dose rates in goats. Try to protect these as long as we can. So also just a few basic issues here on making sure that worms are used correctly.
As I've already said, we have a, a, a diverse number of owners keeping goats within the goat sector in the UK. Some are very experienced, very knowledgeable, but others are just at the opposite end of the spectrum. So these are obviously our, our pet goat owners very often.
So we need to be mindful of the owner's knowledge of the different wormer groups. Doctor Google comes in very commonly, so owners have been on the websites, around the world, they're looking at what, what products are available, what dose rates should be used, and so on. But we need to be mindful of the, the owner's knowledge of what is actually available.
We need to ensure that we can encourage them to get an accurate weight of the goat wherever possible. Because goats are tropical or subtropical animals, much of the fat that they carry isn't subcutaneous fat, it's actually intraabdominal fat. And goats, I think on the whole are much heavier than they look.
And again, a very ad hoc survey that was undertaken at one of the UK agricultural colleges, got a group of students who were pretty good at assessing the weight of sheep, got them to assess the weight of a group of goats, and they were all, almost without exception, underestimating the weight of the goat by around 10%. So they're heavier than they look, because of this interabdominal fat. Make sure again we dose into the heaviest in the group and not the average weight.
Make sure the correct calculations are being made. If you've got a dose rate in milligrammes per kilogramme, and you've got a weight of a goat in pounds, have any, have any calculations been made? Are they the correct calculations?
If we're using automatic drenching guns, there's a need obviously to make sure that these are calibrated correctly. Are they delivering the correct dose? And finally is the wormer in date, and obviously has it been stored correctly, but is the worm in date?
So these are all sort of more common sense things that that we need to apply, but again, it's something that we need to discuss with owners, and particularly when we're putting health plans together with owners. And has already said that. OK, moving away from endoparasites now on to ectoparasites, just looking at some of the, the skin problems that we see in goats.
And the three most common ones that we see in the UK are chootic mange, lice, both sucking and biting lice, and sarcoptic mange. I'm going to start by looking at correoptic mange or foot mange, and as the name suggests, this is a condition that affects goats, primarily in the lower part of the limbs, hence the term foot mange. Although you can occasionally see lesions on other parts of the body, and particularly around the commissures of the mouth, if they've been licking and chewing.
But a common sign here is just to be stamping their feet, rubbing their feet against anything that they could rub their feet against, nibbling and chewing their feet and, and, and so on. So an approach to choptic mange, number one is to confirm your diagnosis. So as I've already said, the site is fairly typical.
If you're looking at goats with hair loss, with skin irritation around the lower parts of the limbs, it's pretty well up in the morning for, for choreoptic mange. But it's always nice to get a diagnosis, so skin scrapes are always useful. But the mics themselves are tend to congregate more around the margin of the lesion.
So if I go back to the slide, this is the area around here that I would tend to take my scraping from, clip some of the hair and take my scraping from here. And that's where you're more likely to find these mites, as I say, they tend to move away from the margins when they can. Management, the majority of the mites are going to be on the host, but bear in mind again that the mites can drop off the host, can persist in the bedding.
So it's important that we ensure regular removal of bedding or regular topping off of bedding. And if we have a group of goats that have got cootic mange, it's usually beneficial to do a group treatment wherever possible, rather than just picking out the individuals that you feel may, may need that treatment. So the available treatments that we can use, there are fipronil based sprays that can be used on a monthly basis.
So products such as Frontline, and bear in mind this is all being used under under the Cascade. Amitraz tactic sprays again, these have been found to be effective. A lot of this, I stress is anecdote that we had from Go Bey Society members and others who've used these products and said that these products have been effective.
Selenium sulphide shampoos have been given quite a good write up. This is the saline shampoo, and then there are the macropsychic lactones, the oral injectable and pour on products. And then, as I've already said, we now have Epriex, which is a licenced product.
But as I've already said, this is a surface living mite. So in many ways, the systemic ectopparasiticides, may not be as effective as a topical parasiticide. But those are the the available products.
And again, this brings issues, particularly in the, in the goat milk, dairy milk sector again. So if there are, goats that are being treated for any of these mange conditions, then obviously there are implications for milk withhold again, 7 day milk withhold. OK, moving on to look now at infectious foot diseases.
So we're still on the sort of, you know, the common infectious conditions. We have a scold and foot rots, so scold here and footrot condition over here, in fact, is the more recently recognised contagious ovine digital dermatitis appearance in a goatoo. This is some work that the Liverpool and the Bristol vet schools have been doing.
But the point I'm making here, it's important as we sheep lameness, to ensure that we get a good clinical diagnosis, that we know exactly what condition we're dealing with. We understand it's ETop pathogenesis and then we can move forward then into looking at ways of, of controlling it. So again, it comes as no surprise that the, the two causative organisms, Daylobacteridosis and Fusobacterium necroru, pretty well exactly the same in sheep as they are in goats.
So if we have goats running with sheep, if we have sheep running with goats, we have a foot rock problem in both of those species. What we have found from bitter experience is that, in goats that are kept 24/7 on deep glitter, it spreads very, very quickly indeed, and can be a major welfare problem if it takes a hold within one of these types of units. Biosecurity is incredibly important.
This is one condition you want to keep it wherever you can. So obviously, if you're buying goats, if you're buying sheep, they're going to be mixing with goats. We need to make sure they come into quarantine.
We need to make sure they're examined on a regular basis and treated if necessary. And not forgetting the indirect risks. And again, because of the issue with small holdings, small numbers of goats, you often find that owners will share equipment.
So they may share hoof knives, they may, may share clippers, they may share a whole range of handling equipment and so on. So this brings in the indirect risk. Again, if feet have been trimmed in a foot, in a way crate, if you've got bits of foot left in a way crate and those bits of foot are contaminated with these two organisms, they can obviously then be available for any other uninfected goats or sheep moving through that same wave crate.
So all these things potentially are going to be important. So these are my, my indirect risks. We have a very interesting discussion at the Goatre Society a couple of 3 years ago, about how we can extrapolate some of the more recent thinking on controlling foot rotten sheep, whether we can actually transfer that across to goats.
And the current thinking with sheep and controlling footrot is that the, the old ad is that we, we need to trim sheep's feet on a regular basis, that has now been dropped, and the, you know, the recommendation is that we don't routinely trim feet. The members present at the Goat vet Society meeting decided between themselves, and I think we all agree that it is, this is necessary for goats. There this this routine for me is necessary for goats, and particularly these goats kept in in deep better conditions.
The goat horn, wall horn will grow at the rate of 6 millimetres per month. And as you can appreciate, without much contact with abrasive surfaces, this can grow very, very quickly indeed. Then the next thing we discussed at the, the meeting was the move within the sheep sector to use systemic antibiotics.
Again, we felt this would be beneficial in goats, but with no product really whether or no practical product, With marketing authorization for you to the goats and goats in the UK, the need to apply a 7 day milk withhold may lead to reluctance by owners to go down that route. And obviously, this brings in the the implications potentially of developing welfare problem. Again, the recommendation from the sheep sector was that foot trimming of known infected feet slows healing, and again, we didn't really feel that we, we knew from the goat sector, but this is something that we're looking into.
Foot bathing is useful in cheap, yeah, and we agreed there 10% zinc sulphate footpaths proven to be very effective, and I think there was a universal agreement that culling severe cases was probably one of the most important things to do. A to control disease and be obviously to overcome the obvious welfare problems that footrot will bring. So, footright vaccination, question mark, nothing with a marketing authorization for use in goats in the UK, but again, anecdotal evidence from veterinary Society members and others that it is beneficial.
So, you know, we have only anecdotal evidence. But if you're faced with a footrot problem, and footrot vaccination is something that you would consider if it was a sheep flock, and I think the feeling is that you'll probably have, a, a, a good attempt with a vaccine to, to, add another tool to your toolbox to control the disease. OK, moving on now to, to my iceberg diseases.
So these are conditions that develop slowly over a long period of time. The presence in the herd may be unknown until the first clinical cases are recognised, by which time we have a lot of subclinical and latent infection within the herd. And this is principally CAE, Caine arthritis encephalitis, Jonas disease, and CLA Caseus lymphadenitis.
So, looking first at CAE, as the name suggests, one of the clinical features is an arthritis, and the commonest joint that's affected tends to be the carpal joint. But in the commercial sector, what we saw in a couple of herds, it had a problem related to CAE was an inurative mastitis. Now this is the normal half of the udder, and this shrunken part here is the abnormal part of the udder related to a, a chronic inurative mastitis.
So with a gland with only two halves, obviously major economic problems related to loss of milk production. Other conditions that we recognise with CAE is sort of non-specific weight loss. And just a point, the E part, the encephalitis part is only a condition we would see in very young kids or kids between about 5 and 10 months of age.
To my knowledge, we've never confirmed CAE encephalitis in a young kid in the UK. Because to be honest, the level of CAE clinical disease in the UK is relatively low, but is an ever-present problem. So, confirmation of infection is by the taking of a clotted blood sample, and this is a lentivirus.
So if we are demonstrating antibody within the blood sample, this effectively is confirming a viremic infection. So obviously a lentivirus, the antibody doesn't rid the virus from the body. It effectively confirms its presence.
And we can use this quite successfully in the clinical cases. If you suspect you've got a clinical case of CAE because of arthritis, mastitis, or any other conditions that, that you may suspected disease in by taking a blood sample, if this is a clinical case related to CAE, that blood sample will be so that blood sample will give a positive result. It's also a relatively good screening test, but I would point out that false negatives are relatively common in goats under 6 months of age.
If I have a positive result in a goat under 6 months of age, I would be quite happy with that. If I had a negative result on the, in a goat under 6 months of age, and I was certainly in the process of trying to clear infection, attempt eradication, then I would probably be testing this goat again, when it was 7 or 8 or 9 months of age. Again, just to point out that there are some health schemes available in the UK, and these are run by the SAC, which is a commercial organisation, but the British Goat Society also has its monitored herd scheme, which is really applied to mainly to goat owners who are attending British Goat Society shows.
It gives them effectively a certificate they can take from show to show. But my message here is keep it out. As I say, the level of infection in the UK is relatively low, and my message here is to make sure that if you're putting together a health plan that you ensure that you blood test all incoming goats, a single blood test on a clotted blood sample, looking for CAE antibody.
So why have I incorporate 11 point I forgot to say, yeah, the main root of infection is by the milk and colostrum. The virus will concentrate in the cells within that first colostrum and first milk. So the goat kids that are taking that milk and colostrum and a particular risk obviously here with Paul colostrum will become infected.
And major importance is to remember that CAE is actually caused by colostrum. It's not prevented by colostrum. So the colostrum is not protective, it actually causes the disease.
Really important point to remember. But what I was going to say, why, why have I mentioned this, as I said, the level of CAE clinical disease in the UK is relatively small, but this is the sort of problem that can potentially happen. This was a herd I was involved with when I worked in APHA.
They had only 10 goats. This was a pedigree goat owner with 10 goats. He had these goats, CAE tested.
They were all negative. He then did what goat owners do, you know, with the pedigree breeders do. They, he visited shows, he bought and sold animals, and decided he would re-bleed his herd 4 years later.
And 4 years later, 7 of his 17 adults were positive, 9 of his 12 kids were positive, and he finished up culling a total of 20 goats based purely on positive CAE LISA tests. But in red writing and bold capitals here, he had seen no clinical disease whatsoever. This is a disease that creeps in under the radar and slowly and effortlessly moves its way through the herd, and it isn't until you start to recognise the fact that you've seen one or two lame goats with swollen joints.
You've seen a couple of goats with a funny shaped ladder that you begin to put 2 and 2 together. So my message here is be aware of this disease and always ensure that it is part of your advice to your clients from a biosecurity point of view, and I'll cover that at the end again. OK, moving on to Jonas disease.
This is another of these so-called iceberg diseases. And from the goat point of view, with Jona's disease in cattle, you know, we think of, it's a, it's a farm problem. But just to emphasise here that I've seen Ya's disease in these larger commercial herds, but I have also seen an outbreak of Ya's disease in a pygmy goat herd on a small holding.
It's the same organism and what had happened here is that they had Jonas disease in some sheep, and the sheep had transferred infection directly or indirectly to these goats. So again, if you're in small animal practise and a pygmy goat comes your way, this is still a disease that you need to keep on your list of differential diagnoses. So what are the clinical signs that we expect to see?
Firstly, a drop in milk yield, not unexpectedly, loss of condition, anaemia, but the giveaway here, and also the difference here between, you know, Jonas disease in goats and urus disease in cattle, is that on the whole, the faeces remain unchanged. We only see diarrhoea in the latest terminal stages of the infection. So those clinical signs there, poor milk yield, loss of condition, anaemia, palliative faeces, Jonas disease with my top of my list of differential diagnoses, followed by fluke, followed by hemonosis.
Those would be my three differentials for that type, that set of presenting signs. So, this is the classic disease, I think, when a disease timeline is, is useful. We know that most of the infection is picked up in the first few months of life, probably for, that are susceptible for a longer period than cattle.
Cattle on the whole, by a couple of months of age, tend to be more refractory to new infection. But there's evidence to suggest that goats remain susceptible for a much longer period of time, maybe up to 8 or 9 or 10 months of age, and that's obviously important if you're controlling the infection. We know that disease then is expressed up to 3 years of age and greater, and I've seen it as young as 18 months of age, but there's a long period between the goat becoming infected and that same goat developing clinical disease.
And during this particular time, the goat will remain healthy and sadly, as within the cattle sector, we have no reliable test to detect this latent infection, and that's important. So, our diagnosis of Jonas disease, we've got our clinical signs, our diagnosis very much extrapolated from this Jonas disease knowledge in cattle, but we can look at faeces samples microscopically, looking for acid-fast organisms. We can culture.
The available PCR test is, is good, but again, just a, a smaller side here. There are some inhibitory substances in goat faeces that can have a a negative effect on the PCR test result. So, although a positive result will be a positive result, I wouldn't necessarily be as confident with a negative PCR as I would perhaps in cattle.
We then got gross and histopathology at postmortem and the serology test itself, which is actually very good in clinical disease. And I stress here, clinical disease. If you've got a goat that is expressing any manifestation of early, middle or late clinical disease, I'd expect the serology test to be positive, and the levels of antibody that we see are often much higher than the levels of antibody that we recognise in cattle.
But as with cattle, I can't stress enough the importance of interpreting just exactly what a negative Jona's disease antibody result means in a goat that is perfectly healthy. All it effectively means is on the day that you took that blood sample from that goat, it did not have or wasn't in the early stages of developing clinical Jona's disease. It does not mean that goat is not infected, and that is such an important thing to to bear in mind.
So what about the pathology? We're familiar with the pathology of Jona's disease in cattle. We have the corrugations in Jonas's disease in sheep.
It is much more subtle. And I tend to put my finger and thumb either side of the start of the jujunum, and just literally work my finger and thumb down the length of the jujunum, and what you tend to find me. What you tend to find are sudden areas where you will feel a subtle thickening, and that subtle thickening may extend for a few centimetres, maybe even 1 metre or more.
If you open the gut in those sort of areas, you can see this sort of subtle thickening, often this corrugation that appears here. So often these fissures that appear here and not the corrugation that you'd expect to see in cattle. So it's very, very subtle changes that you're looking for.
What is more characteristic, is to see these enlarged mesenteric lymph nodes, hyperprotonemia, so again, we've got edoema fluid here, but these enlarged mesenteric lymph nodes, sometimes caus, sometimes calcified, and obviously, this brings in the possibility of other conditions, particularly things like TB, which again, I'll cover in a moment. So control, our attempts at controlling owner's disease. I hate to say it, and no surprise perhaps, but these are based very much on the approaches that we use in dairy cows.
So the good air vaccine is actually has a marketing authorization for using goats and is a useful tool to have in your toolbox, and I know it's used quite effectively in some of the larger herds, not to eradicate the infection, but to allow them to live with a background problem with the owner disease. So the vaccine is very useful. There's always a need to develop a culling policy, but the need to develop a culling policy will be dealt with quite different.
If you have a large commercial dairy herd, or if you have a small herd of 6 or 7 pygmy goats. So you need to know what the owner's aspirations are before you can start to go down routes like that. But again, we need to snatch kids and made them separately, bearing in mind that the the susceptibility period may be up to 8 or 9 or 10 months of age.
We need to avoid feeding poor colostrum. Again, that's one of the mantras on dairy cow units. We need to maintain a clean feeding environment so that goats can't defecate into water troughs and can't defecate into feed.
Litter and manure management is important, bearing in mind also that the sheep and cattle strain of Yona's disease is also the one that we can that we see and recognise in goats. So again, it can be cross-species transfer between the different species either directly or indirectly. And again, this is something else we need to bring up and put through into our health schemes again, which I'll I'll come on to in a moment.
And finally within this group is case's lymphadenitis that we do see relatively commonly. And just a reminder here, this is an organism, so this is a disease caused by the organism, chronioacterium pseudo tuberculosis, which again, not surprisingly, can be transmitted between goats and sheep. It's the same organism.
So here we have a parotid abscess on the left hand side, a parotid abscess here in the bore goat on the right-hand side, and a precar abscess. If you read textbooks, textbooks will tell you that the condition in goats is superficial and disfiguring. Now, that may be the case in goats kept in small holdings, kept extensively, but I can tell you that goats kept in larger communities, house 24/7.
That isn't the case. That is pulmonary CLA. These are lungs of a goat on a unit where we had a fairly extensive CLA problem, and these are actually CLA abscesses in lung tissue in a goat, and we grew chronobacterium pseudo tuberculosis from that sample, also from that tissue there.
And again, I've already mentioned the problems related to small holdings borrowing each other's equipment. Bear in mind that the CLA organism is particularly resistant in the environment. It can survive for about a week on the coat.
It can survive on store for 3 or 4 weeks, and it can survive as dried pus on equipment such as that for up to 4 or 5 months. So dried pus can potentially still have the infectious organisms still there. OK.
Clostridentotoxemia. This is probably one of the most common and potentially one of the most important conditions that I think we see in goats in the UK, and this is across all of the sectors. What's important to remember here is that it's caused by Clostridium perfringents, and in fact it's caused by profringence type D, which is the pulpy kidney organism in sheep.
So caused by profringencey D. And we're looking here at an infection that is basically related to an imbalance between the weight of infection in the gut and the host immunity. Anything that upsets that balance is going to unpredictably lead to disease.
So we're looking here at a disease that is started by a number of trigger factors. So, basically, we're talking mainly about dietary changes, so acidosis, either accidental overfeeding or a goat escaping and and helping itself, any sudden changes in diet, housing goats suddenly turning out suddenly, and we've also seen the condition related to stress from bullying or from concurrent illness, from lameness, from mastitis, from kiddings. So, it's basically a very unpredictable disease.
So again, apologies, and we're far enough away from lunch, hopefully now, but this is the back end of a goat that came into my laboratory for postmortem examination. And as you can see here, severe diarrhoea. You have a strand of mucus and blood in there.
So this is a typical presentation. So this is the second of my differential diagnosis for diarrhoea in adult goats. You've mentioned parasitic gastroenteritis already, and this is Clostridial enterotoxemia.
In cattle, I would think salmonella, but in fact, in goats, I think salmonella is relatively rare. And that is the inside of that same goat. So on the left hand side here, this is almost pure blood that I took from the large bowel, sort of lower, lower trajunum and large bowel, and this is a section of the large bowel here.
So what we're looking at is a hemorrhagic enterocolitis, and we get these bleeding points and ulcers and lesions here. And this is a very, very severe condition and develops very, very quickly. So because of the unpredictability of the disease, and obviously because of the severity of disease, we need to focus all our attention on prevention.
Treatment, if you want to attempt treatment, is largely, I'm afraid, as symptomatic. Intravenous or oral fluids can be useful, calf rehydration therapy in particular, and non-steroidals, analgesics, Rimidil, Carprofin has a marketing, so hasn't got a marketing authorization for use in goats, but I know it's been used successfully, and then various products are available. So basically, we're looking at long term prevention, and the recommendation here is to use Lambivac.
Hasn't got a marketing authorization, used to have, but it wasn't renewed. But this is a 4 in 1 vaccine. So goats are not particularly good at producing immunity against a range of things, which also includes vaccines.
So by giving them only a 4 in 1 vaccine, which includes perfringence type D and tetanus, which are the two that most commonly get. This works very effectively, but, and this is the big but we're coming to here, we need to make sure that we boost the 4 in 1 vaccine at least every 6 months, sometimes even 4 or even 3 monthly if the problem is a severe problem. I've certainly had some of the larger herds where we've gone down to 3 and 4 monthly boosting.
OK, Listeriosis, commercial herds and pet herds again, so commercial herds and goats kept as pets, and the presenting signs pretty much the same as the presenting signs that we've seen in sheep. So encephalitis, abortions, septicaemias and sudden deaths. Diagnosis, this is a goat here that showed the typical signs.
So there's stagmus that we can't see, obviously a drooping ear, salivation, they can't swallow. So the clinical signs are fairly typical from a laboratory point of view, we can take CSF taps, haematology. Only really of any benefit if there is a septicemia there.
If it's a focal micro abscessation of the brain, the encephalitis side, there'll be little change in haematology. There is no serology available to my knowledge in the UK and obviously, we're going to pathology and histopathology for for confirmation. But the clinical signs, I think, are fairly typical.
Treatment must be rapid and decisive, high doses of antibiotic intravenously, and again, this is anecdotal information that's come our way through the goat vet society that potential sulfonamides seem to have been used very effectively at high doses, looking at sheep doses, looking at cattle doses, but high doses intravenously, non-steroidals, and I would say that fluids are vitally important. Bear in mind that a lot of these goats can be acidotic. Their inability to swallow saliva can lead to low-grade ruin acidosis and also to dehydration.
I've done a lot of postmortems on goats, a lot of postmortems on sheep. And one of the classic things that we see is a very dry, impacted rumen. A lot of these goats die, not from the primary effects of Listeriosis, but more often from the secondary effects of dehydration and often renal insufficiency.
So source of infection, not surprisingly, silage, and that's a bad size clamp on the left hand side here, just a heap of grass stacked in the corner of a field, the mud and water washing straight through and resulted in a major catastrophe on a small holding in Wales when I worked over there, and this is obviously a more well controlled unit, more well controlled size management on one of the bigger units. So finally, I'm just gonna have a quick look at bovine TB and goats before we start to summarise. Goats in the UK are currently classified as a spillover host.
So what do I mean by that? Effectively, the cases of TB that we've seen in goats, and these are relatively few, but have been seen in those areas where the weight of infection in cattle and and the local wildlife has risen to a level in which it effectively is starting to spill over into other species, and this is where the goats slots in. And all of the cases that we've seen so far have been linked to the local cattle and the wildlife spoiler type.
So we saw nothing. We saw no cases of TB in goats, bovine TB in goats at all from the middle 1950s until 2007. And then in 2007 and over the next couple of years, we saw three incidents, one in Wiltshire and two in Wales.
All of these were in pet goats and all again were infected with the local cattle TB all of the time. More recently, in 2015, we had TB confirmed in two linked large commercial dairy goat units, and one unit had in fact sold goats to another unit, and the disease was picked up on the unit into which the goats were, were purchased, and the link came because the spoliga type was from a different geographical, geographical area. And then since then in August 2016, we've had another commercial dairy goat herd that has also been affected.
And what we do know is that the spread of infection in these large housed herds can be very rapid indeed. I can't stress again that all are at risk. It isn't just the farmed goats, but all goats are at risk.
And as I've already said, certainly these 1st 3 incidents that we looked at were all in pet goats. So I think really, there must be a legal, well, sorry, there is a legal obligation to report a suspicion of TB to APHA and this occurs, so, this applies mainly if you are in a high prevalence TB area, or you find out that a goat has been purchased from a high prevalence area into your own area where there may be far less TB around. So I think this should be now on your list of differential diagnosis, if you see the following clinical signs.
And not surprisingly, one of them is a nonresponsive cough. Secondly, increasing respiratory distress and non-specific weight loss findings. So if you suspect these clinically, phone the APHA and just have a chat with the duty vets, and they will take you through a, a decision process and as to whether you need to do anything at all or they need to take action themselves.
And the same also applies to suspicious PM findings, and I'll show a couple of pictures in a moment. Confirmation of the disease is still based on the single intradermal comparative cervical, skin test, that we use in cattle. It seems to be very predictive of disease in goats.
The main difference is that, we tend to put one injection on the left side of the neck and the other injection on the right side of the neck, bearing in mind obviously that, you have to, Sorry, yeah, on the left and right side of the neck, and obviously bear in mind you have to remember which side is which. So make sure you've got a stand a position in place there. Consider pre and post-movement, testing if you're purchasing from high-risk areas, and the suggestion from the goat vet Society is that we have 8 weeks separation.
So using the skin test but separated by 8 weeks, and bearing in mind again that to undertake this test, you need to contact APHA for permission to do that. So some pictures, this is a picture of, the golden Guernsey goat from the, one of the outbreaks in Wales, and what you can see here is not what you'd expect to see with TB. This is more like an archanobacterium pyogenes pus, very, very liquid.
I found this same pus in the airways. So having, you know, if you, you've ever seen TB in cattle, it tends to be caus pus, it tends to be calcified, but obviously in goats, it is quite different. And again, this is the more typical appearance here where you've got these chronic granulomatous lesions through the liver tissue.
OK, there are guidelines for those who are interested on the Go to Bethany Society website, and we have a set of guidelines for the larger herd and another set of guidelines for the, the pet or hobby herd. And there's recently been a DA consultation, which goat pets I have been involved with, and again, if anyone's interested, and that's also available on the, on the DEFRA website. So biosecurity and quarantine, just to pull a few things together now, and I'm sure I'm running out of time here.
Biosecurity and quarantine, ideally 28 days with a minimum of 14 days, clinical monitoring for infectious causes of lameness for all for mange and for CLA. And blood tests, if they're not from an accredited herd or flock, we can blood test for Jona's disease, we can do a faecal PCR to back that up, but bearing in mind the, what I've already said about the relevance of a negative test in the absence of clinical disease. The CLA test, which was developed for sheep, we know that has now been accredited for using goats as well, and obviously, the CAE test is important.
And continuing that, I've already mentioned the TB, the 8 weeks apart, the pre and post movement testing, quarantine wormma dosing, I've also mentioned that, make sure that you yard goats, if you can on arrival for 48 hours and not straight onto the pasture. And obviously Zolvixs and Startech not to use these routinely. And from a vaccine point of view, again, depending on the circumstances, but the one to always ensure that you boost for is the cost for your vaccine.
If you feel that the goat may never have been vaccinated, start the process all over again. That's just a paired two doses as you would with sheep, and then to carry on boosting every 6 months. Goat health planning, I wrote an article for the In practise, September 2016, page 387.
So much of what we've been discussing this afternoon, including most of the pictures and so on, a lot of information in there, hopefully, that might be of relevance to you, that, that is available. And as Stacey said at the start, I've written a book on the left hand side, which is primarily aimed at goat owners. I'm one of the vets for the British Goat Society.
John Matthews is the other vet, and that is John's book on the right hand side, but we're we've almost now finished the book in the centre there, which is goat medicine and Surgery, which I co-written with Karen Moller from Liverpool Vet School. This is in the final editing stages now, and it should be available hopefully later on this year. Goat Society, we produce a journal.
We have 2 meetings each year, and again, there's information from the Goat Best Society website, and our meetings are always good, lots of discussion because we have not only vets, but we have owners and stockkeepers there as well. So always plenty of discussion. A couple of acknowledgements, the APHA for permission to continue using the images that I, I, I took while I worked for them, you know, into to my retirement or semi-retirement, and to the many veterinary surgeons and goat owners who've shared their goat problems and their failures and successes with me over the years.
And that's it. Sorry, Stacey, I've got over a little bit here, but thank you for your attention. That is my email address.
I'm more than happy to answer any queries that come up, after this webinar, David Bet at Waitrose.com, and I've had my autobiography published. I've got to plug that whenever I can.
I'm retired and need the income now. Brilliant, thank you very much, David.