Peer Group Meetings
We are having our next peer group meetings at noon at Speedway Lanes 455 N Herman St. New Bremen, OH. January 25, Dr. Greg Habing discusses what they have learned at OSU about Salmonella dublin, February 22, Tom Smith will present the product Ferrapease that we have used as a calming agent and March 28, Dr Kelly Mitchell, of Elanco will present on their new products that mitigate methane emissions.

Dairy Banquet
We appreciate your attendance and feel we had a solid message to move farms forward. If you would like copies of the notes, please, let us know. We will review some of this info in this and future newsletters. There has been much discussion about ultrasounding calf lungs. This tool helps us determine if there is subclinical respiratory disease and when it occurs. The next step is to determine cause. Is there a ventilation deficit? We've been finding some. Just because there is a positive pressure tube in the barn does not mean it is designed, installed and functioning properly. Are calves achieving passive transfer? We can draw serum samples on calves 1 to 7 days old and determine if colostrums feeding went well. Do we have our vaccinations the way they should be? A review may be beneficial.

VoR, Ceftiofur, and Flunixin Forms
Thank you, for signing and returning these forms. It helps keep everything in order for our inspectors and we can make a copy when you need one for yours.
 

Winter - Time to review Vaccination and Treatment Protocols
Some of you have been asking for this, which is great. We like to review protocols annually to make sure what we are doing makes sense. We will be printing these out soon for herd health doctors to review with you.
 

Dr Hardesty attends Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) meeting. Dr. Mark had a requested presence at Ohio Department of Agriculture on FMD. There were not many practitioners but lots of government officials. If this (and many say when) disease comes to our country, it will be devastating. FMD is endemic in 60% of the countries of the world. It is more contagious than the avian influenza our poultry friends are dealing with. It is not zoonotic so it does not affect people. Cloven hooved animals only. Cattle are indicators and morbility is very high. While not commonly fatal it is debilitating enough that many are euthanized. Sheep and goats are maintenance hosts with vesicles that are easy to miss. Hogs are amplifiers with very severe disease and the most common signs are sloughing of hooves. There is a 1 to 14 day incubation period with 7 different serovars and no cross protection. So preemptive vaccination is not a possibility until the infection is here and we can type it. Control strategies would be to isolate and eradicate an outbreak with possibly a ring of vaccination around the outbreak. Secure Milk Supply is a program to prepare farms to continue shipping milk if they are in one of the levels of isolation rings around an outbreak. This involves creating a plan for how milk can be shipped off the farm in a biosecure way, and feed can be delivered with minimum risk of transmitting disease.

What is real Biosecurity? We don't have FMD yet, but we have other diseases that we risk spreading within the farm or from other farms. BVD is one of our biggest risk to bring onto the farm or spread on the farm. Vaccination is the most important tool to stop BVD from spreading. Periodic surveillance with bulk tank testing or continuous testing with ear notches are the next ways to know we have issues to deal with. If you use a heifer grower, be sure your animals are well vaccinated and ask that other animals there are, too. Johnes has become a disease of historical significance since we have widespread Rumensin feeding. It can still be an issue, especially in beef herds. We test suspects aggressively. Mastitis causing organisms Staph aureus, Mycoplasma, and Lactococcus can wreak havoc in the milking strings. Often these can trace back to purchased animals that were not isolated and tested on arrival. Our facilities are not usually built for this, but adjusting them would be cheaper than dealing with these diseases. We live in hope that these diseases won't strike.

What to do with our individual cow SCC data

Dr. Andy Lefeld

What cows should we be looking at with our individual cow Somatic Cell Counts (SCC)? Here are some general recommendations on what to do with your SCC data you get every month (or every other):

High Fresh: every company that does testing may break this down a little differently, but generally these are cows that are above 200K SCC (linear score above 4.0) on their first test after calving. A general benchmark is to have less than 17% of cows above SCC of 200K on first test. Cows identified as being high should be CMT'ed to identify affected quarters. If we know she's had problems with a particular quarter, we may decide to make her a ¾ 'ed cow, and opt not to treat. This quarter has been dry treated (probably) and did not respond, and with it now known to be chronic, the likelihood of cure is low.
 

New infections (no history of issues with her composite or quarter level infection), I would expect on average a good chance of cure. Culturing affected quarters can give us more information on a causative organism, and give us a little more information as to where it came from.  Some organisms have poor cure rates (Staph aureus, also contagious and Lactococcus) so recommendations would be to cull. Start with a CMT to identify quarter(s) affected. Individual quarter culture from affected glands can give us information on what is causing the infection and some idea of likelihood of cure.
 

Chronic Infections: Cows with more than 2 tests higher than 200k. These cows do NOT respond to treatment. Identifying affected quarters via CMT can be helpful to determine if we can cull a quarter only, or if she should be culled. TREATMENT IS VERY LIKELY TO BE UNSUCCESSFUL. Culture can be helpful to determine the cause of these. There are a few organisms that tend to not respond to treatment as new infections, and can eventually move from the new infection category to chronic. A few herds that have been working through these categories of cows have found that Staph aureus or mycoplasma cows commonly aren't the millionaires, it's common for them to be 300-600k, commonly evading the TOP 10 list, but these cows are the ones that are making new cows that will be on the SCC list next month.

WHAT IF I can't find the quarter? She was on the high list (samples taken last week) but all of thequarters look fine, and the CMT has all quarters negative? With automated daily SCC counts we're getting from robots, very transient (like one day) elevations in SCC happen, followed by a long period of a low SCC.  The idea is that the cow managed the insult on her own (immune systems can be amazing), but no one has necessarily proved this yet, we're just learning more now. But it could be that a particular cow was high for one test, that happened to be test day, and next day is fine. We can't make that argument for every cow on our list, but if you have this happen occasionally, it's probably what's happening, continue to be diligent!