Hairy shaker lambs (border disease )

[skidless]

I ve had a ewe have triplets which are hairy and very shaky , plus another hairy lamb , and after reading articles on the internet it looks like it could be
border disease , speaking to vet tomorrow , just wondering if anyone has had experience with this and what action they took .

 

[DKnD]

Yes, but not for several years now....touch wood....
The short version is.....blood tested till we found and got rid of it.

 

[Global ovine]

I ve had a ewe have triplets which are hairy and very shaky , plus another hairy lamb , and after reading articles on the internet it looks like it could be
border disease , speaking to vet tomorrow , just wondering if anyone has had experience with this and what action they took .

The virus is now on your farm, or more correctly, is resident in your flock which could show up each year due to carrier ewes whose lambs will be unaffected. There is no simple way of identifying these carriers. Get rid of affected lambs, as they are usually of little value.
However you can easily protect the naive ewes from becoming infected while they are pregnant. Any breeding ewe that has not been running with the current breeding mob prior to mating is at risk. The way to beat this problem is to let them be introduced to the virus before they are mated. Therefore mix any new replacement ewes with the main breeding flock for at least 6 weeks prior to mating so they can mix and mingle and hopefully pick up the virus and become immune before they carry foetuses which the virus attacks.
Once this disease is prevalent in a flock, this form of mob management is the only preventative failing changing the flock.
This system works the other way too. If infected bought-in replacements are to be wintered with a naive breeding flock, the latter is at risk of their foetuses being affected.

 

[CopperBeech]

It’s basically the sheep form of BVD. So it can also transfer to cattle. It will cause low scanning, I’ll thrift and other issues. The issue you have is some lambs born will be a PI and will continue to spread etc. You can farm it out with testing and culling, but it’s not great and is one of the ice bergs we should all be aware of.

 

[DKnD]

Ok, the much longer answer......

A few years before I returned to farming the old man bought in some ewes to add to the flock.
Started to have lambing issues as you are finding and got the vets involved.
Discovered borders and the vets gave their advice, which from memory was probably as global ovine has described. Fair enough.
Only the old man isn't much for reading so didn't really understand borders disease or how it works.
It got worse over the next few years, scanning numbers dropped, lambing got worse.
We'd had enough, decided to change to blood testing. (A PI hunt )
Started by drawing bloods from every single FM & 6T, as these were the ages of the bought in sheep. These were labelled and tested in groups of 10. A positive result from 1 of these groups would mean those 10 picked out and retested individually. I think we found 2 PI sheep.
Following year we tested the next 2 year groups and another test for antibodies in ewe lambs. Tested for antibodies again the following year.
Strange having ewes running around with numbers sprayed on in summer/autumn.
Wasn't cheap, and that's with my partner drawing bloods.
It would of been a lot cheaper if we'd done it the first year we found borders.

I'm sure trying to expose your flock to borders out of pregnancy works to an extent but its dependant on your system and knowing which animals are the PIs.
As I understand it a ewe who has been exposed to borders will invariably recover and continue happily for the rest of its life, not shedding any disease and therefore not passing on any kind of immunity. It is only the PI's who do this - those born to ewes that were exposed to borders at a certain time of pregnancy (I forget which).

For a relatively closed flock, (which is what we are/were) i would blood test and find the PIs.
For a flying flock, probably do as global ovine has said. Maybe source your replacements elsewhere.