I have come across a number of farms that are having problems with Blackleg recently. Usually it is only single animals that are involved initially, but it is inevitable that other animals in the group will succumb to the infection unless you vaccinate against it. This is a clostridial infection that is able to get established when there has been minor damage to the skin or muscles of the animal. Young stock are particularly susceptible to blackleg although stock with horns and beef bulls also vulnerable.

Occasionally we hear reports of a cardiac form of blackleg. Affected animals are found in a state of collapse and die soon afterwards. When only the heart is affected the heart muscle is inflamed and there is extensive gelatinous fluid in the sac that surrounds it.

Blackleg occurs through out the year, on some farms there is a tendency to get more cases in the spring and early summer. Young stock should be vaccinated before they go out in the spring and the injections should be repeated each year for cattle that fatten indoors on farms where losses occur.

Pneumonia Treatment

There is a new antibiotic called Draxxin developed by Pfizer that from a single injection gives long term treatment for cattle with pneumonia. This is a low dose sub cutaneous injection that persists for nine days or more after a single injection. The advantage of this is that the calves only need to be handled once and it should clear the infection from their lungs and reduce the risk of spread to in contact stock. The new treatment is also licensed to treat Haemophilus somnus which has caused so many problems in the past. Whenever anything new comes along it is always expensive, but because it is a drug that is not related to any of the antibiotics that are in use at the moment there should not be many resistance problems. It might be worth giving it a try in acute cases.

Controlling Tuberculosis

The latest strategy for the control of Tuberculosis in Cattle makes depressing reading. The cost of the disease including research last year was 71 million pounds. There was an 18% increase in the number of farms affected so the chances are the cost will go up at an ever increasing rate. Considering all the research that is going on at the moment essentially there are few new ideas and little mention of badgers in the document. Some of the new ideas may be helpful. For routine testing it has been suggested that it would be better not to test all of the farms in a parish during the same year. The problem is that there might then be a gap of four years before any other monitoring is done. If the infection does arrive in the area it could be some time before it is detected and control measures put in place. What they do not say is how they will change over to monitoring throughout the four year period, inevitably it will mean that initially some farms will need to have extra tests.

Pre Movement Testing

The big problem is the proposal that all cattle from parishes where there is annual or bi annual testing will have to be tested within two months of sale to another farm and that the same animals will also have to be tested within a month of arrival on their new farm. Neither of these tests will be funded by DEFRA, you are expected to pay for them. Part of the difficulties arise because of the paper work involved and the timing. After a Tuberculin Test animals do not respond properly to the injections for sixty days so there has to be a two month gap before any further tests are done. This will cause all sorts of problems for both the buyer and the seller, bearing in mind that the farms where these stock are coming from are being closely monitored in any case. You will not be able to sell stock on the spur of the moment because prices are good. Also you may not be able to hold onto store cattle because you have more grass that you were expecting without the risk of having to arrange further tests on the group.

Spread to New Areas

I can see the logic of pre movement testing to stop the spread of infection to new areas of the country, but if it is to happen it should be financed by DEFRA and not by you. Most farms plan to sell stock for only a short period each year. I should have thought that on farms that are having annual testing more could be done to time the whole herd tests before movements are due or co ordinate the test before a farm sale is organized. The down side is that it would cause all sorts of problems if reactors are identified on these pre movement tests. More could be done to try and identify where the most likely source of the infection is and allow the sale of animals from the farm that have tested clear and are not thought to be in the high risk groups.

Monitoring Badgers

There are plans to continue to monitor badgers that are found dead near roads. If a post mortem on a badger reveals the presence of tuberculosis from an area where it has not recently been detected cattle from neighboring farms are eventually tested. In experimental areas where badgers are trapped and controlled at best only eighty per cent are removed. In the limited areas where this has been carried out it has had little impact or an adverse impact on the spread of tuberculosis to cattle. Part of the problem is that the most sensitive test to monitor the disease in badgers takes two to three days to complete. It is difficult to hold the badgers in traps for this period while the samples are being tested. At best action is only taken against the badgers when the infection is well established in the local cattle population. This gives a distorted picture of how effective an aggressive badger culling policy might be of halting the spread of infection in the cattle population. At the end of the day there seems to be little Ministerial support for any badger culling so there is little hope that this will ever be implemented.

Where to Find It

I have not studied the whole of the document in detail. On page 30 there are two sentences that caught my attention. ’Without tackling exogenous infection, cattle based measures may not be sufficient to have a significant impact on the incidence of the disease. One consequence of this is that individual farm businesses may face decisions about the long term viability of cattle farming if they are in areas of the country with high persistent incidence of TB.” The full document for the latest proposals for the control of tuberculosis runs to eight two pages and can be found on the Animal Health and Welfare section of the DEFRA web site.

Fallen Stock Scheme

There is still no date for the start of the National Fallen Stock Scheme.

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