Health Plans

We have been helping you with and writing health plans for nearly ten years now. Inevitably there has been most interest in conditions and diseases that have a direct economic impact on your farm. Over the years new laboratory tests have been developed so there are now different ways, particularly if you have milking cows, of determining what diseases you are challenged by. This can be useful to plan the best way to deal with the problem by treatment, vaccination or avoiding contact with the cause of the condition altogether.

The Veterinary Laboratories Agency have through their laboratory in Ludington introduced protocols to discover the level of different diseases on your farm so that we can determine the best way to deal with them.

Beyond Health Plans

The programme is called Herdsure and the diseases covered at the moment are Bovine Viral Diarrhoea, Johne’s Disease, Liver Fluke, Infectious Bovine Rhinotracheitis, Leptosporosis and Neosporosis. The idea is that for a subscription of £20 for each of the disease you are interested in they will request samples to find out the extent of the problem to establish the health status of your herd and give a small discount on their normal testing costs. Once this is completed the second level aims to improve things by bio security measures, possibly vaccination and selective culling.

Often it will not be possible to eliminate the disease all together, but it should be possible to control and stop it having an economic impact on the herd. Once you have got to the stage where you are seeing improvements it is important to monitor what is happening so that you can stop the diseases getting established once more.

Biosecurity Measures

All of these diseases have different protocols. What is interesting is that to maintain your disease status you will need to have strict bio security measures in place to protect the health status of your herd. If you are not able to do this there is little benefit from investigating and monitoring the diseases as it will be too easy for the infections to get established again. These are the minimal thing you should consider.

Farm boundaries must be secure to prevent straying and nose to nose contact with neighbouring stock.

Sheep and cattle should not graze together at the same time.

Care must be taken when buying in feed or bedding not to introduce disease. Keep vermin and wildlife away from feed and bedding if you can.

Mains water should be used whenever possible. Do not allow cattle to drink from streams that could be contaminated with urine and faeces from other cattle.

Do not feed colostrum from animals that are not registered to your holding.

Equipment such as drenching guns, livestock trailers, handling equipment and machinery shared between farms must be cleaned and disinfected before each use.

Delivery and Visitor Vehicles should not go onto areas that are used by cattle.

It is recommended that newly purchased bulls, regardless of whether they have been used for breeding before should be held in isolation for nine weeks before first use.

Maintain clean and dry housing for calving and make sure it is well bedded down.

Make sure the udders of all calving cows are clean.

Thinking of Johne’s disease do not feed colostrum or milk from another cow. Make sure milk is not contaminated with faeces, ensure young stock do not graze pasture that has been fertilised by manure and on dairy farms do not allow cattle under one year of age to graze with adult cattle.

Special Measures for Neospora

Neospora can be difficult to detect by blood samples as the test is most accurate only between ten to four weeks before calving so it can easily be missed. This is a parasite that dogs pass on to cattle causing them to abort. The extra biosecurity measures for neospora are to prevent all dogs having access to places where cows calve. They must not get access to placentas or still born calves as this is the way that the infection is passed on. Dogs must not contaminate pastures or stored forage with their faeces.

You might not feel that you can achieve all of these measures because of the way your stock are managed or because of the lay out of your farm. Sometimes small changes can make a big difference so if you can spot anything that might help the overall health of your herd let us know and we will help you to implement the changes to make them effective.

Practical Approach

Herd sure can be expensive in bigger herds because they ask for large sample number of animals to be tested and send out testing requests automatically at different times of the year once you have joined the scheme.

On some farms it might be better to shadow the protocols so that you can get most of the information as to the extent of the disease situation on your farm and then try to live with the suggested biosecurity controls. Once you are sure these are working you can decide whether it is feasible or cost effective to move onto the next level of control and monitoring.

You will make no progress trying to control neospora if you have a farm dog that follows you around all day. You might decide that you can live with the occasional abortion and not change your working practices.

Coccidiosis in Calves

Most farms are affected by coccidiosis to some degree and few now can cope without taking any precautions against the parasite. In the past week I have had three farms where there has been a flare up of the disease. Two of these farms had control measures in place, but they had not been applied as vigorously as they are in the winter months.

Coccidiosis is a problem throughout the year and can be troublesome in the summer when the weather is wet and buildings do not keep as dry as you would hope. Some individuals may need extra drenches to keep the parasite in check at this time of the year.

What’s happening to Bluetongue?

It is still very difficult to find out what is happening with Bluetongue in Europe. DEFRA have recently redesigned their web site, but it isn’t any easier to find out information from it. The changes that are recorded on the European Commission site all relate to reduced risk status in the UK, Portugal, parts of Spain, Italy and Portugal. The maps on the Institute of Aminal Health Web Site which is one of the reference laboratories for the disease have not been updated since October 2008. So I assume that things are quiet at the moment. If there are any changes before the next newsletter I will let you know on the Minsterley Vets Web Pages.

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