Damn Dogs!

[TexelTup22]

Having watched countryfile last night I have come to a conclusion to not allow the dogs on the field with cattle after hearing about Bovine neosporsis! I have never heard about the little nasties, stupid parasites.

 

[roscoe erf]

 

[roscoe erf]

i understood it was not common in dogs that are not fed raw meat as this is where they pick up the disease

In the dog, ingestion of Neospora infected tissue (probably placenta or aborted fetus) results in an intestinal infection (mild or subclinical) with subsequent shedding of oocysts in the feces.

 

[milkloss]

Yes, they are a bitch. We had some neospora for the first time (that we knew of) last year and probably lost about a dozen calves out of some 95 odd. It's not cheap replacing calves either and you wonder whether to bother in case the cow/heifer will abort next year.

I think many farmers will at some point have a couple abort or calve early and not really know the issue. We sent a coupe of calves off to be tested and to be honest it didn't give much confidence. The response was 'well the brain looked like it was neo, but I didn't show in the bloods so it couldn't be. But then it's not BVD'. I pushed a bit harder and got 'we don't really know'. Unbelievable really.

Those cows that aborted WILL go if they have a dodgy calf again and so will any of their offspring that is still about.
I believe it is only young dogs/foxes that are carriers/hosts. The adult will not be a vector. But once you've got it the issue of tidying up afterbirth etc is important.

Blood tests on cattle don't give me a lot of confidence either as they seem to work very much on the principle of an average over a few tests.

Would be pleased to be corrected if I am wrong.

 

[Princess Pooper]

Glad to see it featured a lot of farmers are still in blissful ignorance on this one. It's been a big story on the Archers this year too. Dogs mainly pick it up from afterbirths or aborted foetuses. Over time, the dogs stop shedding but by then the damage can be done. We have NEARLY got rid of it out of our herd, at one time around 20% had it, but being closed we couldn't cull them all out in one year. He didn't mention that you can only blood test them just after aborting or when they are heavy in calf (once they have picked it up they can still have live apparently healthy calves, just that the heifers will probably go on to abort).

 

[Lapwing]

We had a problem with it about five years ago; kept taking samples to the vet lab until they came up with it almost as a "well its nothing else" scenario. They had to find lesions in the brain where it might have been, as previous posts have said that blood tests are difficult to rely on. We were advised that any abortions were likely to be repeated, but they estimated that some 75% of cattle had been exposed to it largely without ill effect. Their description of outbreaks was as a "firestorm" when something triggered it for no apparent reason, then it fades away again. We still get the odd one now looks dubious, but our peak seemed to coincide with vaccinating for bluetongue...