Coughing Cows

It is quite noticeable on some farms now that the stock is housed that there are cows that are coughing. It is not normal for adult cows to cough especially when they are not exerting themselves. If your cows are coughing they are not producing as much milk as they could be either for their calves or for your tank. Take a closer look when you hear a cow cough. Do they have mucus coming from both nostrils and have watery eyes? Are they mainly heifers new in the herd or brought in replacements?  If so it could be they are affected by IBR. This will spread rapidly now that cows are in constant close contact with one another and affect the production of animals that do not have a strong immunity to it. It is not always an easy decision to decide whether to vaccinate against IBR. If you are seeing more and more cows affected the vaccine will swiftly check the spread of the disease and boost your milk yields. When cows are coughing they are not eating as much as they should and they will not reach their full potential.

Worming Cows

What if you are regularly hearing cows cough in the parlour and in the sheds, but there are few with a moist nose. Does it tend to be mainly younger animals and those most recently calved that you are hearing? When were they last wormed? It is a stressful time when cows are first housed especially if they are not used to your winter routine and they have to wait to find a vacant cubicle and avoid conflict with more dominant animals. Lungworm larvae continue to build up on pastures throughout the autumn. We have been lucky that most cows have been able to stay out well into November this year, but they have also been exposed to peak worm challenges for longer as well. It is still only Eprinex that can be used on milking cows, it is still very easy to apply and worthwhile if your cows are affected by lungworm the chances are they will have significant gut worm burdens as well.

Ringworm Infections

It is not easy to cure ringworm in calves in the winter. In the summer surfaces in the sheds are drier, there is more room to move animals around and usually at some point the calves will be able to go out to pasture where time and sunshine seem to work together to get the animals clear of the infection. The fungus does seem to spread more on calves that are in poor condition and make it very difficult if you want to sell any of them. To stop it spreading try to isolate any calves with lesions however small into one group where they will not be able to have any physical contact with clean calves. Always feed and litter the infected calves last and use the same buckets only for that group. Mycophyte is useful as a spray as you can mix it in a knapsack sprayer and drench both the calves and the pen they are in. It does not seem to irritate their eyes and should be repeated every fourteen days.

Preventing Infections

It also seems to help if you can give the affected animals extra food. Young calves will benefit from a multivitamin injection containing vitamins A D and E as this will boost their resistance to infection. Some farms get good results when they include zinc in the ration, it is not likely that there is a deficiency of this mineral, but adding extra does seem to give them some protection from the fungus. If things start to get out of hand and you are getting spread to more and more pens the vaccine will stop the infection in both affected calves and those that are currently free of the disease. Ringworm should not be thought of as a trivial infection, it can spread to us and other animals where it can be difficult to bring under control.

Bluetongue Controls

I was hoping by now that I would have some positive things to say about Bluetongue but I must confess I have failed to find out any useful information. You are all suffering because of the movement controls, made worse because we are on the edge of the extensive Protection Zone, but still a problem for everyone trying to sell cattle and sheep throughout the country. It might be that next year the type 8 serotype is going to get active and cause significant disease particularly in sheep. As things stand there is little indication that this will happen. There is no information as to which sheep breeds are the most vulnerable and little knowledge about whether dipping does have any effect in limiting the damage caused by the virus.

Viral Challenge

What I suspect at the moment is the clinical effects are dependant on how much of the virus is taken up by the sheep when they are first challenged by the infection. If there are large numbers of midges carrying quantities of the active virus all biting at once the victim might not be able to react in time and clinical disease and possibly death will result. If the virus is slower to get established in the sheep the animal is well able to cope with the infection with few or no clinical signs. Most of our midges are a different type to the ones on the continent, or in the tropics. It might well be that they will learn how to pass on the virus, but the chances are they will not be able to do it very well in our colder climate and most animals will be only mildly affected. Midges like sheltered moist places and find it difficult to thrive in exposed fields and windy hillsides.

Movement Restrictions

The Bluetongue movement restrictions make no sense to anyone. As I understand it affected animals have the virus in their blood stream for fifty days or so. The virus over winters in the different life stages of the midge. Adult midges are about in the winter, but they do not seem to transmit the infection with ease until temperatures rise above 15 degrees centigrade. It is not permissible to move animals from here in the Protection Zone to the Clean Zone, but clean animals are able to travel through the Protection Zone to get to another clean area as long as they are sprayed with an insecticide first. Sheep from the Protection Zone are able to go to Welsh Abattoirs without the protection of the insecticide.

Stranded Stock

We have got ourselves into all sorts of difficulties where animals are stranded on farms where they cannot return home for lambing and sheep and cattle are stuck in the wrong place where they are taking the grazing and fodder that should be used to feed other more productive stock. We seem to have learnt little from the Foot and Mouth disaster of 2001. Bluetongue is not going to move around in the winter months so there is little point in imposing movement restrictions. It is the movement restrictions that are so damaging not the disease. Whatever happens the virus is going to spread across the whole of the country next summer. With the evidence so far we might only realise it has been here when somebody comes to take blood samples from your sheep.

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